But I see the outline of a new pattern. Whereas each data mashup is interesting, the right combination can transform my work behavior. There’s a who, what, when, and where, that all have to intersect onto a map and onto a calendar.
I recently met Sanjay Vakil of LuckyCal, who understands this pattern well. He is connecting the dots to create transformative value out of data streams. His product has some growing up to do before it is ready for enterprise rollout. But his product today combines a mapping mashup (telling me which of my contacts are where I am going to be), with a calendar mashup (matching when contacts of mine will be near me), and with an events stream (telling me what other events are taking place there at that time). Hey, that’s the pattern: a set of data streams intersecting to create valuable information out of available information – but onto multiple mashup surfaces.
Suddenly the neurons start to fire. We need more than a single stream of data pins on a map to get our attention. As the LuckyCal product matures, it can become the paradigm for an enterprise mashup - triangulation. If it adds the data streams that matter most to me, (e.g. my CRM data), along with other streams and network information, it results in new information. The triangulation of these data sets means that I could predict whom I meet and what to do when I plan my trips. Moreover, my manager would be able see where the team’s travelers are now, and where they will be in the near future. My sales manager could see which of us will be traveling nearby other clients, and she may want take advantage of the proximity opportunities. Travel still happens, but we can get more value out of each trip. Enterprises like to hear that.
We’ve talked about this before, but I finally got around to putting together a screencast talking about how it might be used:
Hiya! I’ve been fascinated by Twitter for a long time. Feel free to track me down as @svakil.
However, unlike the majority of people using it, I’m more interested in using Twitter to talk to other products, processes and services rather than people. [insert a joke about anti-social engineers here]
The basic idea, expressed best by Laura Fitton (@pistachio) is
Twitter is a great “command line” interface to other apps because it’s simple, familiar, unified and mobile.
I love this idea. In particular, I love the idea that LuckyCal could interact with Twitter in a useful way. I’ve got a heap of ideas on how Twitter could turbo this nascent-but-fertile arena.
On November 5, 2008, we’re going to talk about Twitter and how it might be used as a gateway into other services. Rather that focusing on Twitter’s typical communication modality — person-to-person — we’re going to chat about how Twitter can be used to allow a user to talk to a service, or to kick off a process. Bijan Sabet (@bijan) who recently invested in Twitter through Spark Capital and Laura Fitton (@pistachio) will share their insights. Sanjay Vakil (@svakil), founder of LuckyCal will talk about approaches his team has considered in linking to Twitter.
I have another observation to add to my last blog post on the subject.
I created a stand-alone application that demonstrates the problem. You can see it here, and watch it fail in FireFox 2 (I assume it fails in FF3 but I don’t have it installed). http://apps.facebook.com/iframe_with_swf/
I tried this test on two machines with FF2. To my surprise, I only saw the error on one machine. I traced the issue down to the user-agent string. On one of my machines, the user-agent string was set to ‘Iceweasel/2.0.0.6′. On this machine, the page loaded without error. When I removed the custom user-agent string, I saw the exception.
BTW, To view/change the user-agent string, enter about:config in the addresss bar of the browser. Scroll down to general.useragent.override. You can edit this string by doubling clicking on the name. To confirm the change look at the About box: Help->About Mozilla Firefox.
by Sanjay
Posted in Uncategorized | 
No Comments » | November 19th, 2008
by Phil