The popular and quirky MOO.com is a print shop providing stickers, postcards, business cards and personal introduction cards, which are narrower and longer cards. The products can feature artistic images you select from the site’s offerings or can be printed using photos you upload to the service. Notable for promoting the artwork of hip designers, the MOO service is a favorite among the young and hip as well as among those who want to stand out as being non-traditional.
Recently, MOO launched an API for their service and then ran a contest for developers to encourage the creation of unique and interesting applications.
The MOO contest wasn’t a big production, but rather a weekend-long project that was held at last month’s BarCampLondon5. According to Stefan Magdalinski, MOO CTO, the mashups are “a little rough and ready (knocked together in hours, in true barcamp spirit), but they do demonstrate the range of things one can do quite nicely.”
The Winner
The winning application built with the MOO API goes to Neil Crosby’s Ten Word MOO Card. With this mashup, the app takes the best rated reviews from the The Ten Word Review web site, which lets you review anything in exactly ten words, and then creates MOO cards from the reviews. To make cards featuring your reviews, you need only enter your username in the box provided and the app will generate the cards for you. Here’s an example:
However, if you’re not an active user of The Ten Word Review, you might be more interested in some of the other applications instead.
1) Make MOO postcards via MMS: This app from Sam Machin looks really handy as it solves the problem of getting images from phone to website by utilizing MMS to bypass the tedious the offloading and uploading process. The app receives an MMS sent to a shortcode and posts that to MOO. It then SMS’s you back with a URL from which you can visit the MOO.com web site to continue the design and complete the order. With this app, you could, for example, create MOO cards on the fly from the conference you’re attending. How fun!
2) Make MOO Postcards from Flickr Sunsets: Nathan O’Hanlon’s app lets you create MOO cards from Flickr photos of sunsets in your area. The mashup’s interface isn’t pretty, but hey, it was built in only 3 hours! All you have to do is enter in your location, and the app grabs photos from Flickr and sends them to MOO.com:
Isn’t Tampa pretty?
3) Make MOO minicards from Amazon book covers: Simon Willison’s app could be handy for published authors. With this app, you can create MOO minicards from Amazon book covers. The app lets you search for a book by any keyword – author, subject, title, etc.
4) Generate minicards with your Wii codes on them for sharing: Dominic Hodgson’s app will appeal to avid Wii gamers. This app has the most well-designed and developed front-end and lets you customize options like font, font size, front image color, etc. before creating the cards.
