Nota is a new collaboration tool from the same company that brought you PhotoPeach, an easy-to-use photo slideshow service and C-Shirt, a tool for making remixable clothing. Like PhotoPeach, Nota also has a similar minimalistic feel to it which makes it easy for anyone to use - even those with little computer experience. With Nota, you can create web pages by grabbing content like flickr photos, YouTube movies, Google maps, and more, and mashing them up into one page which can then be embedded anywhere.
What do you do when your industry is shifting under your feet? Taking the lead with radical steps is one strategy. The New York Times did just that this afternoon when it announced that it has released a new Application Programming Interface (API) offering every article the paper has written since 1981, 2.8 million articles. The API includes 28 searchable fields and updated content every hour.
This is a big deal. A strong press organ with open data is to the rest of the web what basic newspaper delivery was to otherwise remote communities in another period of history. It's a transformation moment towards interconnectedness and away from isolation. A quality API could throw the doors wide open to a future where "newspapers" are important again.
Netflix subscribers, here's a mashup just for you: the new Netflix InstantWatcher, an application built using the Netflix API, helps you find the titles marked "Watch Instantly" without having to browse or search through Netflix's vast online catalog. Instead, all the titles that are available for instant streaming are categorized for easy browsing right on the InstantWatcher web site.
The most extreme developers may find themselves left out in the cold.
Twitter watchers know that a large part of the service's use comes through its Application Programming Interface (API) and that's been a big part of what helped the young service grow. Now that the company has Britney Spears, CNN and Barack Obama among its ranks of users, though, developers seeking to push the limits of that API may soon find themselves no longer welcome.
Facebook announced a major change today to the proprietary language that all Facebook apps are written in; it will now be made extensible with custom tags that can be shared across applications. The feature will initially be available only on site but will eventually be rolled out to all Facebook Connect supporting sites around the web. We're excited about it but wonder how open it will truly be.
FBML, or Facebook Markup Language as it's called, was intended to ensure that malicious apps couldn't inject nasty code into the browsers of users. We assume that the new markup will have security taken care of by server side processing and this could enable an explosion in feature sharing and code efficiency.
Last night at the offices of blogging software company Six Apart, engineers and social media specialists from a number of companies large and small met to discuss proposed standards for the future of "activity streams" - the system of displaying recent activities of your friends online. Think Facebook Newsfeed, the basic format of FriendFeed, or the kinds of update chronicles we're seeing now on almost every social network around the web.
Our favorite URL shortening service, Bit.ly, has just released a Firefox plug-in that you'll probably want to add to your browser. It lets users hover over shortened URLs from a wide variety of services, including TinyURL, and see the resulting full URL - as well as how many people have clicked through the shortcut.
Along with Bit.ly's semantic analysis of destination pages, the data unearthed by this new plug-in holds a lot of promise. The plug-in also does some handy tricks on Twitter. It's not perfect yet, but it holds a lot of promise.
Music mashup site shows how User Experience is done.
MP3 blog aggregator Hype Machine launched a new microsite today called the Music Blog Zeitgeist. There you can listen, for free, to entire albums from the most blogged-about musicians of 2008. Bringing together a whole host of different technologies to create one experience, the site is beautiful and a lot of fun to navigate.
Developer Paul Mison has created an interesting Flickr mashup that shows you a map of the locations with the most photos based on a criterion of your choice. By default, that's a tag, but the mashup can also display your photos, the photos of your friends and family, or those belonging to your contacts.
Don't you hate it when you click a link only to discover it wasn't a web page, but a slow-loading PDF instead? Maybe it's time for publishers to find something to do with those PDFs that makes them a lot more interesting and engaging for their site's users. A new mashup tool called Adam (Beta) can help. It lets you take static files like PDFs and images and mash them up with web content like HTML and multimedia. Adam then provides you with an embed code so you can display these new remixed files on your web site.
