ifttt allows anyone to set up a chain of conditional actions between a wide variety of web services, like "If I post a photo to Flickr, save it to my Dropbox." The company calls these "recipes." We wrote about the service when it launched to the public in September. Microsoft's Scott Hanselman also wrote up a nice review of the service and says "this is going to be huge." ifttt isn't just a single service, though, and it isn't even just an amalgamation of multiple services strung-together; it's a great example of a whole paradigm of DIY mashups. As Blogger and WordPress were to self-publishing and YouTube was to video publishing, so ifttt could be to working with interlinked web applications for everyday people. Can this startup herald a new era of lay hackers? The UI is good, the only question is whether there's really enough demand for such a service.

Here's how the startup introduced itself at launch:

"We began with the theory that as our digital tools became more domain specific and easier to use, there would be vast amounts of creative potential in how any two tools might be used in tandem. We knew that with this immense potential came a problem of equal proportions. There just aren't enough developers and designers in the world to craft all these connections. A million developers at a million laptops wouldn't even make a dent. So we set out to build an incredibly simple tool that anyone could use to define creative, event-driven tasks that fit the pattern 'if this then that.'"

If there's anyone who can pull something like this off, having experience at IDEO is great background from which to give it a shot.

The most popular ifttt recipes are here; co-founder Linden Tibbets's are here.

Is this something that a whole lot of people are going to be interested in and go to the trouble to do? I know I am and I wouldn't be surprised to see that you are, RWW readers, but it will be interesting to see how this becomes a business. Either way, it's great to see one of the web's most interesting investors back something so focused on generating creative use of online tools.

The system uses APIs from Twilio and Box.net to let users schedule interviews with contacts, enter notes for the interviews and upload associated files to a central place. Then, when it comes time to do the interview, both parties are sent an SMS to remind them it's about to begin. The person performing the interview clicks a button on TheInterviewr website and both peoples' phones are called automatically. Have a conversation, refer to your notes and documents, then click the same button to end the call. A recording will be available to listen back to immediately. It's like magic.

"The idea," explains British Columbia based developer Roger Stringer, "was to have a site where journalists / bloggers and anyone else who might conduct interviews (even applies to HR people hiring people), can keep everything organized in one handy place and refer to recordings of the interview later."

I'm sure there are other ways to do roughly this same thing, but this is such a nice, clean, simple, fast service - I was in interview recording mode within 2 minutes of creating a quick account. I'll be testing this over the coming weeks - but it certainly seems like something worth paying for.

Mashing up several services to make functionality like this easy and cheap (or free) is classic Read/Write Web stuff.

Thanks to Doug Coleman for pointing us to it.

Called "All Roads Lead to 'Philosophy'," Winter's mashup tests what he believed to be a reasonable theory and it seems to test well. The fact is that Wikipedia is more regularly structured than one might think and as one commenter on Winter's post said, most Wikipedia articles begin by saying that the subject of the page is a subset of a larger concept. As you click through those larger and larger concepts, you will eventually hit the ultimate abstraction: philosophy! It's pretty cool, give it a try.

Thanks are due to the always enjoyable blog Flowing Data for finding this one.

So on some level this is a statement about life and the world (and Philosophy), surely, but on another level it's a statement about Wikipedia.

Two and a half years ago I wrote that Wikipedia's future could be as a development platform. The site contains a gargantuan amount of human created and tended but largely machine readable and structured data. That's a potential gold mine in terms of a potential pay-off in innovation. Wikipedia can offer developers opportunities to glean analysis, supplemental content and structured data from its years-old store of collaboratively generated information.

At least one prominent startup since then, however, has stopped using Wikipedia content as a part of its service because of the site's tendency to explain things either too generally or too technically and the penalty that search engines impose on duplicate content around the web.

But if what was becoming a web of pages is becoming a web of applications, perhaps duplicate content isn't so bad anymore. Perhaps content can become a commodity and platforms like Wikipedia can serve up what they do best (create content) and then its users can do with it what they do best (everything else).

The potential applications go well beyond fun head-scratchers like the Philosophy mashup above, but a project like this does demonstrate just how structured the wild-west of Wikipedia, and of the human experience, really is.

LinkedIn showed off a new addition to its Lab site today called the LinkedIn Connection Timeline. It's a very fun way to remember people you used to work with throughout the years - and see where they are now. Built internally by LinkedIn's Gordon Koo, the visualization does a good job illustrating the tip of the iceberg of what structured, social data can provide when accessed programmatically.

And it's fun. It brings to mind the app Memolane and makes me wish someone would build something like this for Twitter or Facebook. Take the list of people I'm connected to there and show me when on a timeline I connected with the ones I have interacted with the most. Play me a song that my Last.fm profile says I used to listen to a lot, don't listen to anymore and that has a high-emotion rhythm to it and you've got a mashup that could bring lots of people near tears. (You just know that Facebook will offer something like this someday.) Always more emotionally reserved, LinkedIn at least offers a fun retrospective of past co-workers.

I'm cheering for someone to build a Foursquare mashup with Google News and Wikipedia, so I can be told automatically when the places I go have been mentioned in the news or have history posted on Wikipedia. What would you like to see built? What would you like to build, yourself? Af all the competing location services online, Foursquare probably has the best combination of a useful API and lots of rich user and Place data.

That's probably more true of Twitter's location platform than of Foursquare's though. The location-aware future still looks bright going into 2011 though, and moving hackers to the front is a great way to help it get here faster.

Hans Scharler's thermostat keeps dibs on his location, the outside temperature and the temperature inside the house, and decides when to kick on the air conditioning or heat.

We've written about ioBridge (see Top 10 Internet of Things Products of 2009) and ioBridge implementation before (see Automate Your Home Using ioBridge and Twitter).

Scharler wrote the project in Perl, which he said is "perfect for parsing lots of data, pushing data into databases, and connecting services together." He can also manually control the thermostat using an ioBridge Application Programming Interface, or API, that sends commands to the thermostat controller.

Now that the system is functional, Scharler said he's had "a flood of ideas" for location-aware apps mashed with Internet-connected objects. Your house could come alive when you pull into the driveway - thermostat clicks on, garage door opens, coffee starts brewing, your burglar alarm deactivates.

What applications do you see coming out of location awareness and networked things? Do you think these applications are neat, or is Scharler's project a Rube Goldberg machine, performing a simple task with an impressive but overly-complicated mechanism?

When Google Maps launched -- with maps assembled client-side, in JavaScript! -- I was one of the band of tinkerers around the globe who poked at Google's obfuscated code until we figured out how to embed their maps in our own pages. It was a ton of fun, not only doing the reverse engineering, but seeing the various discoveries and hacks other people were making: embedding multiple maps in a single page, swapping out the map tiles, using custom map markers, making markers move, loading real-time data onto maps...These days, it's hard to fathom a Web without embeddable maps. Wasn't it always that way? To Google's eternal credit, instead of shutting these hacks down, they recognized the demand and legitimized it in the form of their mapping API.

According to the Google Geo Developers Blog post, nearly half of the almost 5,000 mashups on Programmable Web's dashboard use the Google Maps API. In an effort to show the widespread influence of the API, Keir Clarke from Google Maps Mania created a mashup of mashups that we've included below. From real-time tracking of buses in NYC to mapping out news down to a block-by-block level, the mashup shows where across the world Google Maps mashups have been created using the API.

New federal CIO Vivek Kundra is in charge of the site, which will act as a central repository for government data, including XML, CSV, KML files and more. At launch a mere 47 data sets are included and they appear to lean towards the least controversial matters. None the less, it's exciting to see the effort happening. Hopefully some awesome mashups are on the way!

There are many, many sets of data available from the federal government but the Data.gov site says it was selective about quality and standards when choosing what to include. It's hard not to compare other sources of government data and feel disappointed, though. The privately built USGovXML.com contains far more data and was built by one independent developer over four months. That site lists ten Department of Interior XML feeds, for example, none of which appear on Data.gov. You can find a feed of food recalls there, but not on Data.gov.

Twenty six government agencies are represented in the catalog, though not all are offering raw data. The FBI is listed as a source but only offers a widget that can be placed on websites, not access to raw data.

New York Times data wonk Derek Willis pointed out that the initial offerings are non-controversial. "Most are from USGS, EPA and National Weather Service," Willis observed this morning. "No [data from] Department of Homeland Security, State or DOJ."

Likewise, a search of the data sets for keywords like food, prisons and drug all bring up zero results. Those are examples of particularly important topics because they are matters of justice and injustice - shedding light into dark corners where injustices are being perpetrated is one of the most important things that government data and the subsequent computer assisted reporting can accomplish.

There are no RSS feeds available for the whole catalog or search queries, something that would be very useful for tracking additions of new data. We expect that will change soon.

People will no doubt argue that some data is much better than no data, and while that's true: for a new federal office to engage with such an important topic with the weight of history and the whole administration behind it and then come up with something this limited is disappointing.

API and mashup watcher John Musser of ProgrammableWeb was more generous than we are about the initial offerings:

"They're off to an excellent start. It's a big step in accessibility of government data. As we've been seeing with other v1 gov-data efforts, like the recently available data on senate votes: step one is give people structured data like xml, step two (or later) is to make it available via an API. They have a healthy amount of metadata. The number of data sets is not that large, but of course it's just the beginning."

It is just the beginning and we applaud the launch of this effort. We hope that the initial launch will pale in comparison to the long term value of this collection of data.

The folks at Sunlight Labs, Google, O'Reilly/TechWeb and Craig Newmark just launched a new part of their Apps for America contest to build the best mashups and data visualization tools for data in the new Data.gov site. Check it out!

See also the newly launched Whitehouse.gov/open - launches today just keep popping up.

On May 1st South Carolina's Senator, Jim DeMint, officially asked the Senate Rules Committee to make the data available and just four days later the feed is here. Not everyone is happy about about the information being made publicly available like this, however.

John Wonderlich, policy director for the Sunlight Foundation, told Politico that the reason he's been given for the lack of XML feeds is this: "the secretary of the Senate has cited a general standing policy ... that they're not supposed to present votes in a comparative format, that senators have the right to present their votes however they want to...it's pretty bad."

Dave Lundy, acting executive director of the Chicago-based Better Government Association, told Politico again that: "It's a strategy to make information hard to find and hard to digest and hard to analyze...Call me a cynic, but I don't ... think [government entities] deserve the benefit of the doubt. We have ample experience to know that people try to hide information, even in plain sight."

Apparently, those problems were washed away this week by the tides of open technology. The Washington Post has offered something similar to what's now available for some time, but there's something to be said for what we hope will be a big, fat, official pipe of data.

We learned of the news this morning when New York Times technologist, Derek Willis, celebrated mention of the news by Rob Pierson, who yesterday began a new job leading new media initiatives for the House Democratic Caucus. The Sunlight Foundation said last week that neither the House nor the senate "maintain any reasonable database of lawmaker votes." The House of Representatives does release their votes in structured format, though.

Willis points out that the new Senate data feeds aren't perfect; the absence of Bioguide ID information linking Senators' names to their online profiles creates an unnecessary additional step for developers, for example.

It's exciting news none-the-less. "It's good to see high profile senators from both parties behind this," says John Musser, founder of the web's leading mashup and API directory, Programmable Web. "Those first steps are often the hardest. That is, just getting understanding of the value, getting buy-in and then having the data accessible in a developer friendly format. The next logical step is to wrap it in an API; having the XML is closer to having an RSS feed, there's not a lot of developer control of what data to retrieve. An API typically gives much more control over what data gets retrieved. Like 'give me all roll call votes for January 2009', versus 'here's the last 20 roll call votes.' Or all roll call votes by a specific senator, etc."

Musser says that he's seeing a broad movement towards increased access to government data. That work is being done by both official sources like this new Senate feed and the data-centric Recovery.org and by outside organizations like the Sunlight Foundation and the New York Times, work Musser is tracking closely.

What's left to open up? Check out, for example, this list of the 8 most desirable but unavailable government data sets, per Willis from the NYT. As of today, one of those can be checked off the list.

From May 19th to 20th, mediabistro will hold its Web 3.0 Conference in New York City at the New Yorker Hotel. The conference focuses on the semantic web, mashups, text and data analytics, and how they add real-world value to end users and businesses.

Keynote speakers at the conference include:

• Christine Connors, Global Director of Semantic Technology Solutions, Dow Jones;
• Aza Raskin, Head of User Experience, Mozilla Labs;
• Thomas Tague, Calais Initiative Lead, Thomson Reuters;
• Loren Grossman, Global Chief Strategy Officer, Rapp/Omnicom.

While some think of Web 3.0 as an almost science-fiction-like intelligent Web, the truth is that a lot of here-and-now technology can make your Web and corporate applications smarter and more profitable. This includes everything from extracting insights from customer behaviors to serve them better, to breaking down the corporate information silos spread throughout your company so that your business information can become actionable insights.

The next generation of the Web is about leveraging the massive amounts of information you have or intend to collect or find available on the Web to make more profitable, efficient businesses and services. This concept will be one of the major drivers of profit as we push past the "2.0" generation and seek the "what's next" of the Internet.

For more details and to register for the conference, visit www.web3event.com. ReadWriteWeb readers save 15% with the discount code XRWW. For best available rates, register by 29 April 2009.

That's just what the nonprofit Sunlight Foundation is aiming to make more possible with its work to make government and related data more available with its new Apps for America contest. More than 40 open source applications and websites making use of that data entered the contest and today the six fabulous winners were announced. We've got a five minute screencast tour of the winners below.

Fillibusted - a site aiming to hold filibustering Congresspeople accountable for their actions.

Legistalker - a site that tracks news, Twitter, YouTube and other online activity by and about members of Congress.

HelloCongress - like Digg for Congressional priorities, with a twist.

Know Thy Congressman - a beautiful informational pop-up about Congresspeople that you can invoke anywhere you find their names on the web.

Yeas and Nays - a sophisticated Firefox plug-in that helps you click-to-call members of Congress.

E-Paper Trail - a data rich site to compare and learn about Congresspeople.

There are also a number of Honorable Mentions included on the Sunlight contest page.

Some of these look more useful than others so far but with a little extra support who knows? It's an increasingly data-driven world, but in order to truly get the most value out of that data the web needs interface and mashup developers. That's why it's such a great idea for Sunlight to support these and other developers the way they do.

Readability doesn't work on every site, but we tested it on most popular news sites and blogs, and it worked almost everywhere. Most of the time, Readability will also display comments when you are reading a blog post. While it displays most images, however, the bookmarklet sadly deletes every embedded video.

What About Those Ads?

Removing the clutter, of course, also means removing the advertising that a lot of sites need to run to make a living. For sites that rely on click-through ads, Readability is just about as bad as AdBlock Plus (or the more anarchic Add-Art), but sites that get paid per ad impression probably won't care too much about this, as the regular page still has to be loaded before you can activate the Readability bookmarklet.

Instapaper, which Arc90 credits as an inspiration, of course, also has a text-only reading mode for saved pages, but its focus is less on making the text readable and more on saving a copy of the page. Unlike Readability, Instapaper also doesn't display any of the images embedded in a text.

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.

Technology combined with Hype Machine's own aggregation and parsing includes:

• Imeem Flash players that let you listen to entire albums for free. Not thrown haphazardly on the site, either, they are displayed beautifully.


• Creative Commons photos of the bands are used to illustrate each entry. The effect is really nice. Reminiscent of what we've see at travel social network Dopplr but actually inspired, they say, by this similar city guide to Berlin.


• Blog Fresh Radio has produced embeddable "shows" about all the music, including interviews with the artists.


• Musebin has been used to automatically create 1 line album reviews, parsed from all the blog coverage discovered via Hype Machine. Visitors can click through multiple reviews without leaving the page.

Check it out at hypem.com/zeitgeist.

As you can see from the images below, there are some shortcomings to the system. It only parses single words (hate is presumably connected to crime, for example) and you can't click on those words to see the context they were used in. For a much more full-featured service regarding congress, see our coverage of the Sunlight Foundation's fantastic site OpenCongress. See also Sunlight's lab project, Capitol Tweets (embedded, right), which consultant to the Foundation Nancy Watzman wrote about here. Check out the new CapitalWords.org.

Cute old guy photo CC via Flickr user aflcio2008.

Today Taylor McKnight launched a new site that he's been working on since Spring, and he says it's like Hype Machine for standup comedy.

The premise is simple, though the site doesn't offer any details about how it works on the back end. TheLaughButton aggregates stand up comedy MP3s and videos from around the web. You can listen to "editor selected" favorites, to a random selection or to the most popular short comedy files as voted by users of the site.

The four person team behind the site curates the large collection and it appears there's about a thousand audio files up now. That doesn't sound like so much, until you think about 14 from Bobcat Goldthwait, 53 from Dane Cook, 100 from Bill Cosby and 178 other comedians represented on the site. Who needs more comedy than that?

There's no account creation, at least so far, there's not much of anything beyond guffaws, voting and links to search Amazon.com to purchase full albums from the comedians you like.

Poking around the site, it looks like TheLaughButton may eventually enable visitors to grab widgets to display their favorite comedy on their sites and collect affiliate payments from album purchases made through their widgets.

McKnight says there's an iPhone app in the works as well - an aggregation of comedy and music content in one interface.

This All Makes Sense

Comedy is something people search for a lot on the web. Voting for the best comedy makes finding good content all the easier. Letting people put a widget of their favorite comedy on a site and sharing the money made from sales is a very smart way to spread TheLaughButton all over.

If McKnight and a loosely associated group of people who seem to be involved with the project are able to give it the push it will need to go beyond the inherent search power the content has - this site could end up doing well.

In the mean time, it's a fun place to hang out.

Photo of McKnight by Flickr user kaekae0318.