Suggestions for a mashup application

Question

I have to write a mashup application for an university course and I have to use some APIs, but I need to choose by myself what to use and what the final application should do. Unfortunately I never made an application like this, so I'm not sure what to do... I don't want to code a stupid app which uses google maps' APIs since the web seems to be full of stuff like this. Have you got any suggestion for me? Is there any mashup web app you want that's still not there?? I can use JAVA, GWT (and google app engine of course) or python, but I also accept suggestions for other languages. Thank you in advance!

Answer 1

While there's nothing wrong with yet another geo-app, you are right that there are far too many out there.

How do you feel about Social Networking and real-time search? Could you pull out interesting stuff from Twitter, Facebook and the rest then combine it with another source of data.

Mixing it up with stock tickers from Yahoo! Finance would certainly be an interesting portfolio addition for finance industry interviews.

Answer 2

YQL has access to several APIs. Perhaps that would make it easier:

http://developer.yahoo.com/yql/

Answer 3

A specific example - Most-Talked-About Tracker

Combine Last.FM, Google News Feeds, Twitter and Google Chart to find out which bands people are talking about, assign scores and show trends. You can compare the media and social coverage to the sales/play data for their music to see if you can predict a one-hit wonder or a lasting band.

If you can, you could add in some text analysis to see if the stuff people are saying is positive or negative. 750words.com has some interesting metrics on it, but I've no idea how it's actually done.

Answer 4

How about a unified photo album? you can retrieve pictures from various sites (facebook, picasa, flicker...) and create an aggregated album per user.