8th blog

A couple weeks ago a big topic we discussed in class was mash-ups. A mashup is a webpage or application that combines data or functionality from two or more external websites or sources to create a new service. Basically its a mixture of content or elements. Anyone can create one of these if they fool around with it long enough.

One of the newest uses for mashups is Twitter. Since Twitter has become so popular almost instantly, all stars, celebrities, TV shows, and even stores have multiple accounts now. Twitter is a way to market, and advertise fast and efficiently. I have been following Wendy's MI account and I received a free $10 gift card just for being one of the first 100,000 followers. There are several mashup applications that I have come across. One of my favorites is http://tweetstats.com/ because this allows you to see favorite tweets and graph what is most popular so that you can change around what you are saying or how often and keep rising up. This is great for large companies.

TwitSpy is another really useful and cool twitter mashup application. This put's real time tweets from the public timeline into a Google map and marks them with a pop up that shows the default picture, how many followers that person (etc.) has and more. You can zoom in closer on the map and all. I recommend checking some of these Twitter mashups out. They make life more simple, lol.