With the exception of one Mountain View iteration and the Dublin experience, I’ve been to every Mashup Camp iteration to date. And while it’s clearly evolved, it hasn’t evolved out of being one of the more interesting conferences I attend. Particularly because it’s a lens into a developer ecosystem of interest; one that didn’t disappoint this trip.
A few observations from the show.
Adobe
While Adobe has fortunately toned down some of their “the web is broken” rhetoric of late, adopting the far more flattering “complementary technology” position, every now and then one of the Flash et al crowd will get a bit greedy and assert the ascendancy of Flash, Flex and related technologies over the non-Adobe alternatives.
Conferences like Mashup Camp are a good reality check on that claim. With the exception of Ribbit’s session (check them out: it’s a bit like CallWave or Grand Central but with an API) and a planned Adobe session that didn’t materialize, I didn’t see a ton of any of the Adobe technologies at the show. It’s just a datapoint, but it’s a telling one given the focus of this developer audience.
Corporate
A few people at Mashup Camp noted that unlike the first few events, corporations were a more frequent and notable presence at this particular show. This is a concern for many, because as I’ve observed on many occasions, most conferences have a predictable trajectory to them. Early in the lifecycle, the corporate interests are few, the energy is genuine, and the content is high signal. If or when momentum and mindshare increase, corporate interest and dollars follow, and the event’s nature is fundamentally altered, typically irrevocably. It’s not inevitably for the worse, but it’s often perceived that way by the initial crowd who doesn’t recognize what their show has become. LinuxWorld is a good example of this phenomenon, in my opinion.
Fortunately, no one seemed at all inclined to argue that Mashup Camp had jumped that particular shark. Quite the contrary, if anything. Some of the corporate demonstrations were compelling, after all (Steve‘s not least among them), and more importantly the unconference nature of the show mitigates any would-be corporate controlling interests. When the content is proposed and decided on by users, at the show, it’s difficult for sponsors to bend the agenda to their respective or collective wills.
Which is a good thing, as far as I’m concerned.
JavaScript
As discussed above, Adobe was not frequently encountered amongst the demonstrated technologies. But neither, really, were most languages. While my census of the employed technologies was not as comprehensive as in years past, I encountered a healthy mix of Java, PHP, Python, Ruby and the other usual suspects.
There was one common denominator, however: JavaScript. Nearly everyone was using it in some capacity, and one or two applications were nearly 100% JavaScript.
To anyone who follows the web development space, the preponderance of the J in Ajax will be about as surprising as the sun rising in the east tomorrow morning, but it’s interesting to see the traction sustained.
Macs
Macs weren’t quite as common as JavaScript, but it was close. Again, this is less than shocking news, but if anything the pace of Mac adoption amongst developer communities is accelerating. How long will it be before developers begin filling empty cups in front of me with spare change, assuming that my lack of a Mac is caused by an inability to afford one?
One other tangentially related item; of the Windows machines present, I only saw one running Vista. Every other non-Mac was running XP. And no, for the record, I didn’t see any other Linux besides my own instance. I was one lone voice in the wilderness.
Mobile
If it wasn’t #1 on the list of the most interesting trends at the show, it was 1A, but mobile was big. One initial tally had a quarter of the projects demoed during the speed geeking incorporating mobile elements, but after day 2 I’d put that number higher, closer to half. Even projects that seemed primarily web based seemed to have mobile components to them, as with the MyVox demo which allowed voicemails to be mapped.
Part of this, or perhaps most of this, is due to the iPhone, which maybe 1 in 3 of the demo-ing constituency owned. iPhoneLocator (only for jailbroken iPhones until the iPhone 2.0 arrives in June) being exhibit A of this, and iMovieMash.com being exhibit B.
For the Google folks in the audience, Android also was represented, with Metosphere based on the platform (in case you’re curious, the developer was not in love with it).
This trend, I think, is only likely to accelerate in future camps; the mobile cat appears to be out of the bag, permanently. And all I can say is: it’s about time. This should lead to far more useful handsets – particularly here in the US – where we’ve been shackled to devices carrying only the paltry applications the carriers tried to cobble together in a desperate and predictably futile effort to up their ARPU.
Multi-Dimensional
Not in the Hugh Everett “Many Worlds” sense, but rather in that mashups are now beginning to layer data along multiple dimensions. Rather than just dropping pictures along a map, for example, the WHAT HAD HAPPENED guys showed off the ability to place Flickr shots along a timeline. As both the data availability and the ease of integration increases, we’ll be seeing more BI cube like parsing of mashed up data, because mo’ context equals mo’ better. In a data sense, anyway.
Spatial
Once more, mapping mashups dominated the application scene. Like the multi-dimensional comment above, however, it was interesting to see the boundaries pushed. No longer are developers merely content to use maps as static objects to be integrated with other static objects, like real estate listings or the like. Instead, the spatial implications of maps are beginning to manifest themselves in an application sense. Maps are becoming more dynamic, as location information via handsets or other GPS devices is incorporated along with routing and other fancy location based services.
Should be fun to watch.
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