A while back I started getting interested in site’s that used API’s from several different sources to create what is known as a web mashup. “A mashup is a web page or application that combines data or functionality from two or more external sources to create a new service” – Wikipedia. There are plenty of really good examples of web mashups out there, if you are interested check out ProgrammableWeb’s site.
At this time I wrote my own craptacular mashup called The Gob Shite, this site was a mashup of Google’s YouTube, Google’s News feeds and a new API of my own called the TrendEngine. TrendEngine was developed using Google Hot Trends information and provided some level of stability to the constantly changing trend list. It does this by detecting reoccuring trends in the list and applying a weighting formula to them.
TrendEngine currently operates from a private server written in PHP, I am currently converting this code to Java to run on Google’s App Engine. The new TrendEngine service will be publicly released shortly and will be listed up on ProgrammableWeb for all to use.
More information to come soon.