Teqlo: The Monster Mashup?
With the big buzz that Yahoo Pipes mashup tool received recently, it seems Teqlo kind of got lost in the shuffle. Sure, a number of sites have covered it, but somehow it doesn’t seem to have received the same buzz. And yet, it’s as important a web service, maybe more so.
If you’re not familiar with Teqlo, it’s an web application builder that requires no programming. While Yahoo Pipes lets you remix web feeds, Teqlo lets you mashup up applications in a plug-and-play fashion. At present, there are over 30 widgets, each of which is an actual web service or the equivalent of. This is only a partial list of widget categories and actual widgets:
- Feed manager
- Feed reader
- Google Calendar
- Google Maps
- Google Gadget
- Google Spreadsheet
- Delicious bookmarking
- LinkedIn Person search
- Contact manager
- Call list
- To do list
- eBay search
- Blog post builder
- email sender
- YouTube viewer
Teqlo, like Yahoo Pipes, is still in beta and is a bit buggy, but it is an amazing step forward in web services. Imagine what sort of custom applications you could put together with the above selection of modules, and any that’ll come along in the future. And you don’t need to know how to program. All you do is define the interactions between any two modules on your canvas to define the flow of information. It’s really as easy as that. And there’s even a tie in with Yahoo Pipes, but you can create your own custom feed reader that uses your own Yahoo Pipes.
Teqlo has sweetened the deal by asking you for feedback on the interface/ service and awarding one iPod per week for three months for the best suggestion. The interface still needs work but Teqlo is an example of the future of web services and applications. It’s more than possible that in the near future, coding in AJAX to build ARIAs (AJAX Rich Interface Applications) will be completely unnecessary. Plug and play is the future.
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Hey Raj, thanks for the writeup. We got a way to go, you’re right - but my goodness you’ve certainly cottoned on to the main point.
I particularly appreciate ideas for powerpacks (ebay springs to mind), ‘cos even while we’re building out the infrastructure we’re trying to get a handle on what is actually useful for people.
Jacoby Thwaites, CTO, Teqlo Inc
By Jacoby Thwaites on March 23, 2007 8:39 am
Hi Jacoby. Yeah, coming up with widget ideas is a tough one. I’ve been racking my brain to come up with a few, but haven’t. However, I do have ideas for more interactions. There are a ton of great widget modules, though I can’t always get them to interact with each other.
I was trying to create a custom “research” app that any blogger might like. It’d have a feed reader, Google Calendar, to do list, email sender, blog post builder. However, what would really rock is if the blog post builder actually was a fully functioning blog post builder with which I could post to my different blogs. (Of course, that’s a lot of SOAP work for your team.) And a few more interactions between modules that can’t currently speak to each other.
(I’m repeating this over on your Teqlo blog.)
By raj on March 23, 2007 9:09 am
Great ideas, thanks. The interactions will get much better, I think by end April. Much tedious infrastructure reworking to do in the light of our experience so far. Rod Boothby (who will read this) will particularly value the blog ideas.
By Jacoby Thwaites on March 23, 2007 9:17 am
I am really sorry about Teqlo being shut down. I was really looking forward to it :(.
By John on February 21, 2008 3:18 pm
[...] Teglo - the Monster Mashup? [...]
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