Now that I’ve had some sleep, let’s look inside the disaster to learn some stuff about voice mashups. First, let’s see how it matches up with what the hallmarks of a voice mashup are:

• Not a Voice Application : First, even though this is a submission for the Broadworks mashup contest, this isn’t a voice application. Voice mashups are not voice focused; they are application focused. This application is a framework to help a dispatcher communicate with field workers, report status to his superiors or outside parties, and to save what happened for later analysis. If you take voice out of the application, you still have an application. If you take voice out of conferencing… you’ve got nothing.
• Web as Platform : Secondly, this application is built on the “Web as Platform” model. The application runs on top of several other applications and platforms, and integrates them together using web services. In this case, we’re using Twitter as one platform, and Broadsoft as another. We are using an RSS interface to hook into another platform in real time – this could be a master feed from every dispatcher, or a feed from a major news service… whatever.
• Uses Web Technologies : Thirdly, this application leverages true-blue web technologies. Instead of using .NET (an Enterprise technology) and Java (an Enteprise and carrier technology), it uses Ruby on Rails as the framework, on top of web services interfaces to Twitter and Broadworks, RSS for importing data, and supplies an RSS feed to other data management services, HTML as the UI and Amazon’s EC2 as the hosting engine. It even uses super-hip, will never use anything unless bodily threatened, HAML as the markup language.
• It’s small. Real small : Mashups address the long tail of development, which means that the apparent audience for each one is quite small. This is self consistent: the power of mashups are that they are practical to construct from easy to learn technologies. Here’s a good visualization… think of a space shuttle. Got it? Now think of the opposite. Yup, that’s a mashup. Less than 600 lines of code here, and a good deal of it is UI. Poor Broadsoft has like, three lines of code or something.
• It’s focused. Real focused. : If you are anything but a disaster dispatcher, would you use this application? Unlikely. But if you are, I guarantee you that this tool, or something a lot like it, will be invaluable. But hey, no problem there…. since mashups are so easy to put together, you can make your Accounts Payable Autobugger, or Sarah Palin Flickr Imager, or whatever you’re into.

So, as you can probably infer from the application and the post, the real reason I did the Disaster Dispatcher wasn’t to dispatch our boys in blue to the flowing magma, but was instead was to help show what a voice mashup is, and how it’s put together. I suppose I really didn’t do it to compete, not that I wouldn’t love a trip to the Broadsoft Contest. So, I’ll touch on that one tomorrow: Disaster Dispatcher Technologies.