You already know that Amazon and Google published some of their Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and opened their databases to developers for a while. In fact, many of you already are using them.
In this article, Margaret Kane looked at some new services. Among them, I selected the TouchGraph GoogleBrowser, which displays Google results, not as a ranked list, but as a graph. For other services, please read the full article.
"In a way, Amazon and Google are outsourcing their user interface development, with the developers working for free," said Alex Shapiro, chief technology officer of TouchGraph, a developer of Web applications. "In exchange for letting others easily access their data, these companies perpetuate their brand, spread good vibrations through the developer community, and allow others to experiment with all kinds of innovative solutions without taking on any risk. In turn, the developer gets to act as the portal to Google's/Amazon's data, thereby benefiting through the advertisement for whatever tangential services that they offer."
Shapiro wrote an application that lets Web surfers browse data through a unique graphical interface, as opposed to a list. The feature has been applied to both the Google and Amazon databases, presenting intriguing pictures of how books and Web sites connect with one another.
CNET News.com picked one example on the TouchGraph website about the National Science Foundation (NSF) website.
Here is a larger example showing some of the links to this weblog.
A last note on the TouchGraph GoogleBrowser: you'll need the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) version 1.3 in order to run it.
Sources: Margaret Kane, CNET News.com , November 20, 2002; TouchGraph LLC
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