Dapper puts weather.com (and Matisyahu) on your calendar
Marshall Kirkpatrick
24 comments »
Since we profiled Israeli startup Dapper, the controversial and very intriguing service has added about 2,000 new data sources that anyone can mix and mash from sites around the web. That’s been done in one month. The company calls itself a way to “create an API for any website,” though others call it a fancy screen scraper. Whether it’s a legitimate business or not, whether the rest of the web can be pushed into an era of data portability at Dapper’s pace, remains to be seen. So far the company says only two small websites have gone through their opt-out process.
This week, though, the folks at Dapper added iCal as one of the formats available for data export. Now in addition to adding data gleaned from any site on the web to your own applications via 11 different formats - you can also sync data from many sites with iCal, Google Calendar, Outlook or anything else that supports the iCal format. That means I’ve got the weather.com forecast for my zip code for the next ten days automatically appearing at the top of my iCal display. Very nice.
Unfortunately, the service in general is very difficult to use. I asked the company for examples of data sources (called dapps) already in the database that could be easily imported in iCal format. Here’s four quick examples they provided:
- Ten day forecast for weather.com.
- Concert tickets from cheapeasytickets.com, for awesome Hasidic Reggae musician Matisyahu in particular (iCal file).
- Mugglenet, a Harry Potter news site.
- Apple News, from the Apple website.
These dapps work with iCal reasonably well, so it’s clearly possible and very useful. I don’t want news in my calendar but I do want forthcoming events and the weather. The Dapper team tells me they are going to hire a UI designer as soon as they get some funding and that couldn’t happen soon enough because the site is a disaster (for me) to try and use. Some one please, help them with the UI, this is a great tool that so many potential users just walk away from because it’s so hard to use. I can’t give up on it because when some one is able to make it work the results are really valuable. So ask yourself what you’d like in your calendar, maybe someone else has already braved the interface dungeon that is Dapper and created a tool for to accomplish your goal, or maybe you can struggle through it yourself. One way or the other, it’s a very handy service when it works. It’s nice to have the weather forecast on my calendar.
Why can’t some simply include the javascript/widget provided by weather.com into their site?
Why go through this hassle of dapping?
http://www.dappit.com/transfor.....rg_0=94086
Offering services that are easily integrated into other applications will be essential for many web 2.0 startups.
Trying to hold stuff proprietary is an old mentality, and the successful companies are starting to realize that.
i like the service.. very useful!…and i’m impressed with the way they churn features…
I agree, it is a great service with a great potential but they must improve two main issues: the design and the simplicity of the service. You may find more coverage on Israeli startups (in Hebrew) in the following blog: http://www.thecoils.com
I actually kind of like the interface the way it is. It is pretty straight forward and doesn’t include fluff that you don’t need.
It’s one thing to re-publish SOMEONE ELSE’S content when you have permission, but it’s another thing entirely to just go ahead and publish their content without permission, especially if you plan on making money doing so.
Content owners shouldn’t have to opt-out of shit like this; users are supposed to opt-in. This is because there are so many more users than content owners that it would be impossible for content owners to know when and where they have to opt-out.
I hope this company gets shut down or blocked by all the services their stealing from.
Shit like this gives Web 2.0 a really bad name.
Oh…and a good portion of the sites that Dapper’s lifting from already have their own APIs, none of which allow commercial redistribution but which all allow using the content on one’s own site or applications.
I played around with it, it is a very cool service, but yes it is a bit hard to use… then again most tools that are this powerful usually have a learning curve.
My first test was scraping yahoo movies for showtimes from whatever specified theater, this is actually something I just accomplished the other day with PHP and regex so I thought it would be a good test. I dont know if there was some sort of advanced mode, but for some of the fields I was trying to get it to capture , it would also capture some other ones that it thought were related but actually weren’t. They were highlighted a different color (either green or red instead of yellow) though so I think that means a “kind of” match, but I couldn’t find anything that let me specificy exactly which ones I wanted.
Oh well… I will definitely be playing around with it some more. I love how you can export the results in so many different formats (html, xml, ical, goole gadget, etc)… very cool.
Yes. I was quite wrong. This indeed is a powerful tool. I now understand its use.
This is a great tool. Mr. Kirkpatrick why don’t you invest some money to allow them to hire a UI expert to make the site nice and smooth.
Do you think this site is worthy of investing in?
Saeed
Thanks to everyone for the valuable feedback, as always.
Sean: Check out the “advanced features” demo at http://www.dappit.com/dapperDemo/demos.php. You’ll see that you can use the slider to control how much and which content is captured. Also, you should supply several examples to Dapper when creating your Dapp, as this will increase accuracy.
To everyone else, we’re all ears when it comes to UI suggestions.
Thanks again,
Jon
Dapper
what i don’t get…is…what about advertising….
you’re essentially stealing content from one site to place in another; averting advertising from that site…now; if you advertise on your site, and got paid through advertising, would that be copyright violation; given the content is original? from say weather.com?
and if this continues…where information is passed from one site to another…screen-scrapped, and advertising is subverted…will everyone go bankrupt?
why pay for advertising when it will never be shown?
As far as using other peoples’ content without permission, the old saying ” the more things change the more they stay the same” applies!
Don’t know whether or not this has been brought up before, but if you’ll take a look at their demo video, their “constraints” feature did not work for the Digg submitter. When he (the presenter) is scrolling through all of the stories, all of the submitter columns are filled with “no value”.
Another great innovation brought to us via Web 2.0.
There are a several UI sore spots, but many should be very easy to fix.
Dapper could truly rock, and I would find it *very* useful for my crawling needs. I hope they document their API a bit better too.
there are several posts here about stealing content. as long as attribution is given, i don’t see what the diff is between dapper content and any blog post that contains content hand-pasted from another site. one’s automated, the other’s not.
hm, this seems pretty cool and useful. i can see the issues surrounding it though. it will be interesting to see how it develops.
as far as getting weather into ical, weather undergound offers an ical feed for their forecasts.
Interesting - but it looks like the majority of services are somewhat loosely coupled, with wrappers, as opposed to true web services - a great interim solution to whet the palate.
The difference, rickdog, is that these sites don’t allow their services to be reused for COMMERCIAL purposes without their consent.
Just reposting it on one’s site is fine, since they allow they; if an individual were to use a Dapper-like program on their own site, that would likely be fine since the sites provide an API for that purpose.
The problem is that Dapper STRIPS the ads and other material from the feed and REPLACES it with it’s own. Dapper is essentially stealing the content because 1) it’s using it without permission, and 2) it’s profiting off the content.
I agree with Saeed. It might be worth investing in a powerful tool like that and applying it for commercial purposes across the board for all content sites and creators. That way everyone will benefit both from the easy use and dynamic application fo the tool to various content anywhere online, and both the original creators of the content and the users of it can enjoy a piece of the revenue.
What do you say?
Tal
In response to the twice asked question, I do think this site is worth investing in if you have money to invest and like this sort of thing, yes. It’s a fascinating gamble.
It was nice to see Matisyahu on techcrunch.