Potluck: Assemble Your App From 100 Web Services

From the creator of YubNub (ok it's me) comes a new service that lets people assemble new applications from 100 web services. It's called Potluck, and it hasn't quite hit 100 services yet, but I've made it super-easy to add new ones. The basic idea is to make web services more accessible to Real People by making them as easy as clicking checkboxes.

It took me all of one day to build Potluck (well, a day and a half). It's the glue that unifies del.icio.us, flickr, Google Blog Search, and the other web services into a single app. The idea is simple: each web service gets its own page (or "tab"). All you have to do to contribute a web service is make a webpage for it, host it somewhere (you can get free PHP hosting at Ning), then submit its url. It's more powerful than meets the eye (there are ${named parameters} if you want, for instance).

It's going to be an interesting experiment, and the apps will look a bit rough (demo) until I add the ability to choose from CSS skins (and submit new ones). The goal is a lofty one: offer people a menu of 100 web services that they can build an app out of by ticking a few checkboxes. Let's build it together!