Mashing Up Web 2.0

Although we report on snazzy new web applications that are gaining interest, we rarely write about how these apps could work together. This is probably due to the fact that these applications are written by small teams who are independent of each other and working to provide one specific service. Even so, people are tinkering with web 2.0 technology to make it work together. Flitter is an interesting example of the shape of things to come. It is a homemade mash up by David Bausola, a creative technologist and publishes an RSS feed of images of Flickr that match the latest Twitter pings.

So now we have Flitter (beta, of course). A mashup between Twitter and Flickr: Using Yahoo!Pipes to aggregate the lastest Twitterings of the public timeline, then it matches up these texts with Flickr image descriptions. This creates an RSS feed which I pull into VVVV running on my local machine, which basically creates a slide show of the resulting matches.

Not the most fascinating animation, but the role of Twitter to edit/select/sequence the images from Flickr is what I’m interested in here. Unlike the inspirational Ad Generator, which is a random matching of image and text, or We Feel Fine, which creates a soup of matches, Flitter aims at creating media that reflects what is happening as close to realtime as possible. Not as an ontology of the present, but towards the significance of relationships within the audiences ‘loose couplings’ . Less the uncanny, more like a live semantic broadcasting.

How could you use something like this?

Smile – you’re live on Flitter « Zero influence