Well, well, well... look who's back! The Where It's At crew have finally managed to produce another podcast. It only took 12 months, during which time many technological advances were made at the Where It's At studios. Editing time for the podcasts has been halved and in the hardware department 'headphone splitters' are being employed to great effect... we have the technology!
On this show we touch on everybody's favourite theme... 'the lake of blood ' plus we also talk about spatial API and mashups statistics from Programmable Web, a WiFi location service with the same name as Josh & Renee's beagle, poor Miss(fortunate) Teen USA South Carolina (closely followed by a very long demonstration of our poor geography) and finish up with comparing the popularity of spatial with that of porn on the internet.
Everyone expects that spatial has been a common theme in the large proportion of mashups on the internet. In fact, you could be forgiven for thinking that mashups are mostly about maps. But, is going to stay that way?
On ProgrammableWeb.com they are currently registering an average of 3.45 mashups per day (over 2000 in total!) and have more than 500 registered APIs. This is a great site to learn all about the mashup market, which APIs are most popular, what topics mashups are attacking and more.
There is a very interesting matrix on the site to explore showing in a graphical way which APIs are being combined with other APIs to produce the mashups. It's clear from this that Google API's are very popular but it has been said that its difficult to monetize Google API mashups.
ProgrammableWeb stats show that about 50% of the registered APIs are spatial or mapping related, while less than 40% of the registered mashups are mapping related. This becomes interesting when you have a closer look at the mashups registered in the last 14 days . When i checked it out, only 27% of the mashups registered in the past 14 days were mapping related.
The growth areas seem to be photo and shopping related mashups. Is this a trend that the API developers are yet to respond to or is there more to the story? Better check back in a few weeks and see if the reduction in production of mapping related maships is persistent!
I was interested to see just how popular (in the true sense of the word) spatial had become in the broader community and how that might have changed over time. This was going to be interesting as usually this would take quite a bit of research and some skill in the interpretation of the resulting information. Since i had neither the time, nor the inclination to do this job properly, i headed straight for Google Trends which plots the volume of searches for particular search terms on Google over time.
Plotting 'maps' in Google Trends showed a large spike in popularity of that search term in 2005. The peak is then followed by a decline phase until 2007 where we see the return of 'maps' popularity. This was interesting and warranted further research so i plotted 'Google Earth' and the peaks of both terms seemed to match (August 8, 2005 seems to be the magical date for Google Earth). So, as suspected the popularity in spatial (if 'maps' is a good surrogate) was probably driven by Google Earth.
But whats happening in 2007 to drive the maps revival and the Google Earth decline? It requires more than 10 minutes of research but it may have something to do with the rise in utility of digital maps on the phones and other cool devices not to mention the public expectation of having maps integrated in neat ways on web pages.
