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Janko Röttgers, author of “Mix, Burn & RIP” (sort of german “standard” literature on the digital music revolution) wrote a Giga-OM-post on LastTube, another take on YouTube vs. Last.fm, questioning the economic eligibility of mashed up webapps. I had similar thoughts when Google released My Maps few weeks ago… like those niche mapping-apps’, last.tv & LastTube will probably be rendered obsolete once Last.fm is launching their original video-features. on the other hand, given the minimal investment required for most of these mashups, it’s probably only fair to leave financials aside and see them as fun projects which can at least help creative developers to get their name out there.

ps: btw, I had an interesting talk with a friend who’s currently doing an internship at a small independent label in Vienna - his job includes looping the label’s compilations all day long to push their artists within Last.fm

people - even less tech-savvy ones - are starting to create all kinds of interesting Pipes…

• automated babelfish-translation (english -> german) of Adam Curry’s Daily Source Code show-notes
• P2P-Blog utlitizes a custom del.icio.us-tag to keep track of all blog-posts you have commented on
• this pipe mashes data from Yahoo! Local with flickr to find localized imagest
• Nick Bradbury’s YouTunes combines iTunes Top 10 Songs-feed with matching YoutTube-clips
• my own vanity pipe combines results from Technorati & Gooble Blog Search to keep you updated on what’s been written about you/your product/your company

wow, the whole web is singing the praises of Yahoo! Tubes Pipes, a new mashup-service announced earlier today. unfortunately, the Pipes-servers haven’t been responding for most of the evening, Yahoo’s engineers have either underestimated the impact of this announcement or the ressources a service which could be described best as universal RSS-mashup-engine might suck up. however, from what I’ve seen in the short period of availability, Pipes offers a drag&drop interface which allows users to query, combine, filter, merge etc various source-feeds into one output-feed. besides pre-defined RSS-sources (including Google Base, surprisingly), users may of course add any given RSS-feed (OPML-support seems to miss). very promising so far, lets hope the plombers fix the Pipes soon…

(screenshot courtesy of TechCrunch)

Yahoo!’s mashup OurCity retrieves location-based data from various Yahoo!-properties. photos from flickr, bookmarks from del.icio.us and events from Upcoming together with news-clips, blogs & podcasts draw an appropriate picture of the city. currently in early beta, the service is available for Delhi & Bangalore only.

(screenshot courtesy of GigaOM)

at first glance remember the milk is just another web2.0-ish to-do manager (other popular options include Basecamp’s Ta-da Lists and Voo2do). though it features a clean interface, options for publishing and sharing to-do lists as well as a Google Maps-mashup, what really makes it interesting to me is the integration with Google Calendar that was reviewed by Ajaxian yesterday. remember the milk’s to-do lists can be injected with full read/write-access into GCal simply by importing an external calendar-feed. this is a neat workaround, at least until Google finally builds native support for to-do lists into Gcal.

Janko Röttgers from netzwelt.de discovered snappradio.com, a cool mashup developed at Sun Labs. snappradio generates flickr-slideshows accompanying the music currently playing on last.fm by matching tags between both services. as Janko points out, this works quite well for better-known bands but might also bring out funny results (like getting aeroplane-shots from North Western Alliance [=airline] while listening to rap-pioneers NWA )

(screenshot courtesy of netzwelt.de)

MapLib is a very nice mashup allowing to view any uploaded bitmap through Google Maps’ AJAX user-interface. customized maps support markers and can be embedded on any website. interestingly, Manfred Wuits (yumyum) demonstrated a very similar technique a month ago at BarCamp Vienna (check the video-feed of his demo).

wow, this looks like some awesome patchwork of technology! News At Seven is a video news-show, 100% automatically generated from content-bits all over the net. claimed to work totally autonomous, the engine fetches news-stories from various blogs and websites, runs the text through speech-synthesis, mixes it with matching still-images and video-clips and add’s a Halflife-character as virtual news-presenter - voila, instant virtual news! from the creators:

In this, our first deployment of the system, the show produced is a three-minute daily news update, featuring national, international, and human-interest stories, with commentary from blogs on the national story. After the material has been assembled, the system is ready to present the news using preset scripts. The engine, and our extensions to it, allows us to present believable human-like newscasters as well as more imaginative scenes and sets that are only possible because the show is virtual. We also use techniques to make the generated vocal audio more interesting and believable.

though the quality of speech-synthesis could be better and some of the clips look out of place, this feels like an impressive glimpse of how news/TV could be produced in the not-too-distant future… (and it reminded me of the short news-casts featured in Starship Troopers ;)…)

(Screenshot courtesy of Boing Boing)

as of yesterday, more than 1.200 Google Gadgets formerly restricted to Google Desktop are now free for use on any website you want. the widget-collection includes modules for streaming-video, inline-chat, flickr- or iTunes-integration as well as loads of - more-or-less useless - eyecandy.

more interesting: Google launched an unbranded search-frontend at searchmash.com earlier this week. looks like searchmash is going to be a test-bed for search user-interfaces. currently searchmash integrates image-results with common results and allows ‘infinite’ scrolling through results (while Microsoft Live does this by automatically loading further results when the user scrolls to the bottom of the page, searchmash requires the user still to click the link “more web pages”, which kind of renders the feature useless for me).