FindtheBestMashups

From MashupCamp

Main takeaways:

  1) Trust: spam, ratings, who uses what
     1) Trust of the original product,
     2) Trust of community-added metadata (tags, ratings, etc)

  2) Interoperability, structure and behavior. What framework is used? What are the sources of data? What APIs are used?

  3) Licensing and user agreements (more metadata?)

Main discussion

Describing an action that a widget does is a hard problem. How do you quantitatively measure a mashup or widget?

Problem exists: Finding a widget that does what I want, but usually does 80% of the job.

Ways to find data:

  1) Ask friends
  2) Ask a foundry or marketplace: Freshmeat, Amazon, SourceForge
  3) Ask a search engine

Friends are reliable, but lack full data sets. Foundries are good, but may be succeptible to spam and trust issues. There are also multiple foundries. Search engines don't capture all of "What widgets use flickr? What widgets support photo finding?"