“by 2010…(Mashups) will be the dominant model (80%) for the creation of new enterprise applications ”
A few people have been asking me about my Multimedia Undergrad thesis so I thought I’d just take a few minutes to go over what we did.
Mashup
For my thesis myself and a few friends set about creating a mashup website for an after school charity in the liberties area of Dublin called The Computer Clubhouse. We wanted to understand the possibilities and challenges in using Web 2.0 technologies to create cohesive social web communities.
Mixing Youtube, Picasa, Google Chat and some other third party websites we created a social networking website, called MistCast, which allowed the Clubhouse students interact with each other in a safe and fun way.
Images by @EirePreneur via Flickr
Taking a microblogging format (think tweets) each Clubhouse student was given their own profile on which they could upload audio, video, images and text. These updates would then be sent to and stored on external websites such as YouTube, Picasa and Google Chat and then displayed on the student’s profile page for the other Clubhouse students to see. The students could also comment on each other’s uploads.
The Computer Clubhouse
The Dublin Computer Clubhouse is one of 3 in Ireland and dozens around the world. Founded by MIT in 1993 the Clubhouse is designed to allow students to create and develop skills through technology.
Why do this now?
Building the site this way provided the students with a way to safely express themselves while still engaging in the social web. It also allowed to us gain a thorough understanding of the possibilities and challenges of creating these types of websites.
It would be a mistake to believe that social networking is simply a passing fad or only for teenagers; over the past year the social web has been adopted and used by companies and organizations as a means of promoting themselves to larger audiences. Companies such as Dell, The New York Times, Ford, The Guardian, Vodafone, Cadburys and Reuters have all adopted social networking strategies over the past year as a way of promoting their brands. Dell alone claims to have made $1m dollars from it’s social web activities.
In May this year, just as we were submitting our thesis, The New York Times appointed Jennifer Preston as their, and indeed the industry’s, first Social-Media Editor. And, of course, as I blogged earlier U.S. President Barack Obama used the social web as a means of coordinating his online campaign through the my.barackobama.com website.
Web 2.0
While most things nowadays are described as being Web 2.0 the terms does have a very fixed and definition. Tim O’Reilly, the web usability expert, defined the term Web 2.0 in 2005 as;
“Web 2.0 is the network as platform, spanning all connected devices; Web 2.0 applications are those that make the most of the intrinsic advantages of that platform: delivering software as a continually-updated service that gets better the more people use it, consuming and remixing data from multiple sources, including individual users, while providing their own data and services in a form that allows remixing by others, creating network effects through an “architecture of participation,” and going beyond the page metaphor of Web 1.0 to deliver rich user experiences.”
Web 2.0 is not a technological redevelopment of web technologies but a means of defining the new, more social, uses of existing web technologies. Although defined in 2005 this technology is still in its infancy. The forthcoming HTML 5.0 and CSS 3 releases are designed to make the production and syndication of this content easier for both users and developers. Hence, building the MistCast site as a ‘Mashup’ was designed as a means of understanding these forms of syndication (mainly API codes, widgets and XML documents etc, as this is the basis of Web 2.0.)
Industry
Using this technology to build this “architecture of participation” was the core of our thesis. Combining these technologies is simply not enough to create a vibrant online community; the developers must understand not only the technology but the community that are building the site for. The client, for whom the site is being built, must also have a firm plan for the site, be it creating a short term online community (Cadbury) have done, building market share (The Guardian) or creating a blended community of offline and online users (Barack Obama); they must understand how to use the technology as well as its inherent dangers.
Challenges
And there are some major disadvantages. Country to popular belief creating an online community takes time; Twitter was founded in 2006 but only came to prominence in late 2008, early 2009. Perhaps most importantly Web 2.0 sites remove form the client much control over their content. File size limitations can be prohibitive, pages can be deleted, content can be copied and downloaded and social websites such as a twitter and YouTube can fail or be hacked. These site also need to monitored regularly for any user interactions (comments, video responses, retweets) that may be detrimental to the brand
Engaging the social web allows both companies and individuals to create a more responsive audience to their brand. However the creation of a social networking site does not in itself preordain the creation of an active online community. The online community must be supported through real-world artifacts and, most importantly, users must be able to incorporate the any such site into their daily lives. Nevertheless a lack of visible evidence of participation (e.g. media uploaded, content entered) is not evidence of a lack of participation in the online community.
From a technical perspective we found that Mashup technologies are clearly powerful, however, they have limitations. Such technologies allow the addition of potent functionality into a site in a short length of time but one must be selective of the APIs used. However the social web is not without its faults or dangers and it must be used with caution. Third party sites are out of the control of the Mashup developers; as can be seen by the closing of Google’s Mashup Editor in 2009 (McDonald 2009) and the changes made to the Twitter and Last.fm APIs.
As demonstrated by the standards being incorporated into HTML 5, Mashups are clearly seen as the next stage of web development. With an increasing number of large name companies using the social web and creating Mashups as promotions and marketing tools, developers need to understand not only the technical aspects of community generation but also the social and commercial aspects. This thesis has provided us with a firm understanding of the possibilities and limitations of API technologies and, perhaps more importantly, empirical knowledge of the challenges and possibilities of creating and maintaining a community of active users.
So that’s it really, check out the Clubhouse’s website, they do good work.
