There are so many mashups around us that we have begun to take them for granted. We tend to see more of the video and music variety -like Everyblock and those that are Obama-based. Google has a tool called ‘maplets’ to use the API of their maps.
How about a mashup of a mug and your Twitter followers? Check this out.
So I was glad to hear that there’s a British competition open for mashups, on three themes: Crime, Environment and Health. The winner gets £10,000!
Here’s what I will remember about 2007 from the perspective of marketing, social media and communications. We obsessed about these stories in PR, marketing and social media.
1. Facebook made us rethink what social networking could do for one-to-one communications.
2. Network neutrality became a debate that not just the geeks and telcos were interested in.
3. Short codes gained popularity as the new URLs, as text messaging took off. Sadly, it took the shootings at Virginia tech for universities to realize the value of this kind of messaging.
4. Mashups became more entertaining than the original. Think: the “1984″ spoof ‘commercial‘ about Hillary Clinton, viewed over 3 million times.
5. It was the year micro-blogging (with Twitter and Jaiku) got taken seriously,
6. This was the year email spam (in the form of “co-worker spam” and “PR spam”) hit a tipping point, forcing communicators to take a good hard look at databases, and how to try to target better. Not convinced? See the rumpus Wired editor, Chris Anderson’s “sorry people you’re blocked” post did.
7. A new, intriguing search engine called Mahalo (made possible by humans, not just algorithms!), the future of Wikipedia, and whether “amateurish” knowledge is helping or hurting us.
8. The toy for grown ups: the iPhone, what else?
9. Beacon, Facebook’s daring experiment with something called “social ads.”
10. Obama-mania, both here and abroad.
(cross posted from ValleyPRblog)
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