Well, the Web 2.0 Expo is here in San Francisco this week, extending its delightfully O’Reillyesque tentacles into every nook and cranny of town — including a takeover of South Park — epicenter of the first round of Internet hilarity back in the late ’90s. The town is full of nerds and marketing types alike, City Hall is all lit up, and you can’t go near SOMA without tripping over all the discarded conference badges.
Stamen’s part in these shenanigans was played by partner Mike Migurski, who, along with Twitter engineer Alex Payne, presented Design Your API: Learnings from Twitter and Stamen. Mike’s got a post up about the talk, Matt McAlister has provided a nice writeup, as has Eric Nguyen at Mindtangle.
Aside from the tickle I get at seeing “Twitter and Stamen” on the marquee, the thing about this that makes me happy is that there seems to be a growing openness to the idea that it’s the way things fit together that matters online — that it’s all well and good to have an excellent site, but if people can’t quickly and easily access the data on their own terms, you’ll only be able to involve them so far. And I love that people are responding well to the idea that the simple Excel spreadsheets that Crimespotting makes available are just as important and useful for making data about cities available as the more complex APIs that projects like Cabspotting or Diggmake available.
Alex and Mike put their presentation up on Slideshare; you can get a sense of what they talked about below.