Mashups: One I like, One I don't

There are a lot of flickr mashups, and it makes sense -- flickr mystique is one of it's main assets, and that mystique includes a willingness to focus with obsession -- makes sense for a photo site, right? Most of the mashups are tricks and treats without a lot of practical use but they demonstrate the skill of the programmers and the fleixbility of flickr's structure. That seems small but contrast it to the way Microsoft and Apple hold their API's tightly. (I know, Apple has a much groovier reputation, but the reason there are no eaudio vendors for libraries that vend material to use on the iPod is because Apple holds it's Digital Rights Management structure so tightly). And you can bet that the programmers who do the mashups -- especially the ones that rise to being "hits" on the web -- get attention.

I don't, myself see much in Mappr. It relies on tags (or perhaps the user profile) to determine geographic place, and then thumbnails pictures based on that. Putting in a zip 25425 deals a deck of pictures connected in some way with Harpers Ferry West Virginia yes. But it's hard to see that the mappr interface advantages a user much over just using flickr's native search.

On the other hand retrievr is cool. You sketch a simple design in a box, and it pulls back flickr images that look something like what you drew. It has more sophisticated tools built in that let you upload an image to find a match from the rest of the flickr corpus. The basic idea probably has a much more powerful implementation at the National Reconnaissance Office and the FBI; but this little trick seems quit innovative and sharp (and doesn't rely on tags or captions to generate results). Of course, the similarity of the sketch/uploaded image to the retrieved images is not always clear. But interesting nonetheless, and you can't go wrong with a seascapes, cats and monkeys.