Web Services Mashup

I am excited about the myriads of new web services cropping up all over the web. If you live or work on the web, you use many of these every day. Flickr, Twitter, Del.icio.us, Google Maps, Google Calendar, Google, etc...

Today, Facebook released a new feed import feature. It's great to see Facebook embrace and make room for some of the web's very best service (Flickr, Picasa, Del.icio.us, Digg, and Yelp). In a Web 2.0 world (unlike the .com era) it's interesting to see how your competitor's differentiators can become your features. Who needs acquisitions when we can roll an integration in less than a week? I think we'll see a lot more of this as web services and social networks continue to progress. Smart companies will learn to leverage the power of other great web services and social networks in their own products while still focusing on differentiating themselves with their own unique offerings.

Announcing Google Calendar and Picnik Integration

Another one of our core values at Markup Factory is to help web designers make the best use of all of these web services. What better way to do this than to put them right at the fingertips of web designers and content managers? We recently finished integrations with Google Calendar as an events feeder and Picnik as our feature photo editing component. Sure we could have tried to roll our own rudimentary image editing component, but Picnik has done it so well that we thought we'd save our time for what we're really good at and embrace Picnik as a feature of our application rather than view them as some kind of competitor. I'm sure they won't mind either.

We hope to see much more of this in our application and in others in the coming months.