There has been a lot of talk about web 2.0 - “web as a platform”. Enough has been said about what web 2.0 means, what being platform is. Quite of few us here in our immediate team(s) have been talking about web being a platform for development. As luck would have it, some of us have also been tasked with developing some key web api services for yahoo.

We started exploring ideas for a demo that would test(push) some of the apis we have been developing - and quite fortuitously - we ended up with a demo we think is rather cool and illustrative of web being a platform in a real, meaninful sense.

I know what you are thinking, Yet Another Mashup Meme - YAMM.

There is a lot of mashup meme going on right now. Russell Beattie’s rant here questions the value created by most of the mashups. He brought into open a lot of questions people were having as they saw mashup after another doing very similar things and not pushing the boundaries. Joe Krause referred to the “froth” in start up market in his web 2.0 panel and asked folks to think if some idea is a feature, product, or a business.

Most of the apps we use on a regular basis (desktop or web 1.0) are built on top of several apis, data sets, widgets & services. It is very rare to see a really useful, powerful application use 2 services. Most mashups
though are doing just that. They use some data source overlayed on maps.

As I mentioned before, we have developed an events browser - mainly as a way to improve our api design - but quite accidentally ended up with a true AJAX app. While this app is anchored on the new yahoo! maps AJAX API, the core functionality is built using several widgets, various yahoo! API services including the Term Extraction API. Infact, the usage of term extraction api shows how we can connect information available on the web better. Ed goes into more detail about the coolness of the app.

The more I look at this demo, i remain convinced that we are just begining to explore the possibility of web as a platform.

A lot of credits should go around for this app. Kudos to chad, ed, jonathan, karon, nate, raymie, sam, toby for making this happen!.

Update:

Events Browser is getting picked up by quite a lot of folks. jeremy has list of folks talking about the new maps in his blog post. The list below is folks who talk about Events Browser.

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