API Slam

I attended the google maps talk at the bootcamp this afternoon.  As usual, the presenter (Mano Marks, Google Senior Geo Developer Advocate) mentioned several new tools, including Fusion Tables.  That got me roaming around Google labs.  “Wow, that looks cool.”  “Oh, I’ll have to check that out.”

Now, maybe I’ll get around to exploring the Google Prediction API, or doing something interesting with with the Yahoo Answers API, or I’ll finally hack something with version 2.0 of the Wulfram Alpha API.  But in the spirit of hack, I wonder if it would be possible to do this with a group?

Here’s the idea: Bunch of people get in a room (coders, of course, but not exclusively — “what do we do with this thing?” is as important as any other part of this exercise).  And together, we pick an API we don’t know and fool around with it for the session.  We might even build something!  At the very least, I bet we’d find out whether we’d like to devote serious time to an API.  And I bet we’d get there faster than doing it alone.