Hacking
for
Innovation
Christian Heilmann | http://wait-till-i.com | http://scriptingenabled.org
Sunderland, UK, University Hack Challenge, January 2009
Hello, I am Chris.
I am a hacker
and a geek.
The term hacking has a lot of
different meanings.
To me it means:
“Altering a system to do what
you want it to do using what
is at your disposal.”
It also means having a lot of
fun trying to make things do
what they weren’t made for.
It is unrestrained innovation.
So welcome, innovators!
We’re here to host a
University Hack Challenge
We want you to show us what
can be built using the systems
we (and others) offer...
...that makes a difference in
your lives and make the
things you care about easier
to achieve.
Find something that always
annoyed you with systems
you use...
...and build a workaround.
You’ll be amazed about the
impact this can have.
To reach hackvana you need
three things:
Access, Data and Users
Access happens on several
channels.
The oldest way is to cheat
your way in using a very cool
piece of software.
Using cURL, you can be your
own browser and get any
data from the web to remix.
The problems are that you
don’t get the data back in a
structured way.
You’re at the
mercy of the
HTML structure
and if that one
changes your
hack fails to
work.
This is why clever companies
realized that it does make
sense to offer their data in
easier to digest formats.
RSS or Really Simple
Syndication was born.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/restaurants
http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/restaurants/rss
Using RSS or Atom feeds you
get data in a predictable and
easy to convert format.
It doesn’t allow you to request
specific data or define a
different format though.
This was the next step: REST
APIs or Web Services.
REST based Web Services
allow you to request the
correct data from a system.
Which brings you to the
second hack ingredient: data.
Shortly before YouTube
announced their API to build
your own YouTube Player.
I took the API and Antonia’s
findings and built
EasyYouTube.
Screenshot of Easy YouTube
http://icant.co.uk/easy-youtube/?http://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkdZmi85gxk
Easy controls
★
Option to search for videos
★
Copy and paste video URL to share
★
Select video size
★
Easy Volume Control
★
Option to show a playlist created with del.icio.us
★
Option to search YouTube
★
API to automatically open videos in Easy YouTube
★
Documentation how to host it yourself
★
Open Source
★
Another example:
I use Twitter – a lot.
Not all of my updates there
are valid for re-distribution
though.
So I use Pipes to filter my
updates and get them back as
JSON:
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?
_id=f7229d01b79e508d543fb84e8a0abb0dd
And adding a few more lines
of JavaScript I can now
display my “useful tweets” on
my blog:
However, coming here I
wanted to show a quick new
example and spent an hour
on Sunday on a hack.
I think I said, I use Twitter – a
lot.
I got all this emails from
Twitter telling me about
people following me.
What I didn’t get was it telling
me when people left me.
Or what I was telling the
world before they left me.
So I dug into the API a bit and
built TweetEffect.com
http://tweeteffect.com/?user=codepo8
I put it up, and started testing
edge cases.
One of them was Guy
Kawasaki, whom I knew has a
lot of followers and updates.
One of them was Guy
Kawasaki, whom I knew has a
lot of followers and updates.
And that started a landslide of
visitors, comments and ideas
for it.
Tim O'Reilly
Guy Kawasaki
Ryan Carson
What about reach?
That was me, time for you to
show what you can do!
Innovation is not a matter of
skill or being in the right job
position.
It is a matter of wanting to
change what we have and be
ready to play.
We do this to help you see
your potential.
And we do this to see if we do
a good job in explaining our
offers to the developer world.
The web is yours, go out and
play!
THANKS!
Christian Heilmann
http://wait-till-i.com
http://scriptingenabled.org
http://twitter.com/codepo8
Moon bridal hat photo:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/foxtongue/23309042/
All other photos of the interwebs
my friend response - 'unrestrained innovation' 4 years ago