LINKS
I can’t yet see a secondary app for the data though. Most of the new stuff I think is interesting in the new “Web 2.0”, as people are calling it, is apps that connect other apps. I wrote a proof-of-concept script a few weeks ago where I use bloglines to give me RSS feeds then I snag the pagerank data from google to sort them by popularity. That turns out to be less than super-useful because Google’s pagerank is only 1-10 so you end up getting a bunch of 7s and only a few pages go above or below the median. But the concept is sound. I used data from two sites to make a whole new app. I can see a ton of useful things to do with the data Flickr provides (when camera put gps coordinates in the picture metadata the usefulness will go up exponentially) and I’ll probably code one or two up soon to see if they pan out. I’ll have to think on del.icio.us though, at the moment it just seems too random to do anything new with.
Since I use perl and perl is awesome, there’s almost always a very easy to use module on CPAN to access the APIs for these sites. That means I code up something quickly to see if it will work without having to spend days writing my own API stuff.