Daylife API Challenge is a Flop, Shows That Mashups Are Hard
We get excited around here whenever a new application offers an Application Programming Interface (API) for 3rd parties to develop against. Oh, the possibilities! Sometimes, though, it just doesn't pan out and our dreams are dashed against the craggy rocks of reality. Mashups are hard and just because you've got some cool data and good hooks for developers to pull from doesn't mean anyone's going to build anything worth using on your API.
Such appears to have been the fate of news platform Daylife, a company funded by some of the biggest names in tech and new media. Daylife recently held a "developer challenge" giving cash prizes to the people who built the best mashups with their API. Unfortunately, the entries they got were awful.
Mashups Mashups Mashups
We learned about the Daylife contest today on Programmable Web, the leading blog and database about public APIs and mashups. PW must have felt obligated to be polite and just report on the contest, albeit weeks after the winners were announced.
We were really excited to learn about the contest - Daylife is a company with some good technology, offering news content with some structure to it. What could make more interesting fodder for mashups than structured news data? It turns out almost anything could, if you judge from what came out of it.
If you can't see the video above where we look at the mashup contest entrants, here's a Flash version.
To take a tour of all the applications discussed in the video, you can visit this link.
There Is Still Potential Here
The examples that came out of the contest are all relatively dismal, with the exception of the touchscreen news reading interface. Over on Programmable Web's page about mashups built on the Daylife API though, we found one very cool one. TreeHugger's GRNDX tracks media mentions of a number of words related to the environment. (No one cares about the environment this week, apparently, the Olympics are all anyone cares about.)
That's pretty awesome - even if Treehugger calls it more fun than scientific. Fair enough, but let's see more apps like this instead of the wacky stuff that dominated the Daylife contest.
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Part of it just may be the common problem that I (and other developers have) - we see something shiny, and we immediately want to play with it, but don't necessarily build something of quality/useful, because after a certain point it's no longer a fun thing to play with anymore: it's just work building it
The flip side is the other problem I have, where I bookmark pages of APIs to write against, applications to try, etc - and they just sit there in my bookmarks in a "someday" bucket, but they were never a high priority, and years later someday hasn't come.
Sid- what about the cash prizes though?? lol, thanks for telling it like you see it. I think your explanation is probably a sound one for many developers.
Part of the reason for Daylife was that they were too focussed on partnerships early on and blew off developers. I applied for an ID and didnt hear back for a long time!
Semantichacker.com's challenge also didnt gain much traction!
If I were a developer and have time on my hands .. would I develop some service myself or would I develop on somebody's API and hope and pray that I win some $$?
Not to mention the fine print in these contests!
I think the issue is that developers are still bound by the non-commercial terms that go along with many of these api's. If, for instance, more developers could profit directly from their applications, then we'd see the kind of ingenuity that drives every other sector software development. Perhaps then we'll begin to see the rise of enterprise mashups that we're all waiting for.
www.newwebplatform.com
Marshall - Thanks for the the insightful review. Developing mashups for a contest can be a trade-off between writing something cool or something useful.
Our contest entries ranged from mashups that were visual, interactive, mobile or simply informational web apps with more than 20 other API platforms.
For Daylife, it got us great developer feedback, feature requests, questions and many more things to work on.
To see what is in the pipeline, do check out http://labs.daylife.com .. And we do look forward to our contest next year with more and more features in our API.
Cheers!
-- Vineet Gupta
Developer Evangelist
Daylife
The problem is the api must be tied to a very good service, it must be a very good api, and the stuff that is built using it must also be very good.
Thats a trifecta of stuff that has to click just right, and that's hard to make happen.
On the web, it seems, you start with one thing, one link in the chain, and then slowly build from there..
I see Xcerion and others wrestling with the same problem.