Ben Trott, co-founder of SixApart, the creators of MovableType, presented this afternoon at eTech. Talking on the subject of building personal web services, he talked about building tools for personal use.
Remixing of code, not content, though not with an eye towards replacing existing web services, but rather with an eye towards personal use and development.
There are lots of APIs out there, along with tons of RSS feeds, plus geo-location data, and this is all waiting for folks to utilize as the basis for new and interesting services.
There are many libraries, in most programming languages, to facilitate such development, and Ben goes on to give a couple of examples.
The first one is a personal friends aggregator, which is a page that lists all posts from your friends. Details in the slides if you wish to build a similar tool.
Another example is a feed splicer. It’s a simple tool, and joins together all feeds from one person who posts on multiple sites.
In summary, this presentation did provide a few ideas for folks who are looking to implement simple web services for either personal use or as an educational project.