Summary of Week 2 Web 2.0 article

Unwittingly, Paul Rademacher made history by fooling around in his free time. In an act reminiscent of early Reese's candy commercials, Paul married the data from Craigslist.com's real estate listings with Google Maps to create an interactive housing viewer. The simplicity of Google Maps' API allowed Paul Rademacher to focus on his real estate data source. However, that didn't require much effort, since Craigslist provides up-to-the-minute listing data as an RSS feed.  RSS (which stands for RDF Site Summary, but often referred to as Really Simple Syndication) is a computer-generated data-file format that sites use to communicate their contents to other sites and applications. Using a really simple definition structure, (thus the name,) RSS makes it easy for developers to extract and integrate data from other sources into their own.  In a tradition started by the now defunct SixDegrees.com and followed quickly by Friendster, social networking is the power added to an application when users specifically designate their relationship to other users of the same site or application.  APIs, RSS, Folksonomies, and Social Networking have been around for a while. What's interesting to us right now is that our current understanding of them and the tools available to implement them make it possible to create powerful applications very fast and relatively inexpensively.  Finally, we predict we'll run into what we call the kitchen organization problem. While we all know where we've put the glasses and plates in our own kitchens, it takes only a trip to a friend's house to realize that not everyone organizes their kitchens the same way. Folksonomies and social networks make it easy to share, but if we all organize our own information with our own evolved structures, chaos is bound to emerge when these conflicting structures are merged on a massive scale.