Dapper – Empowering Content Providers

Dapper, the service enabling anyone to use and reuse any web-based content is now open to the public and promises new features and improvements to Dapper’s functionality in the coming months. Dapper’s mission is to allow visitors to use any web based content in any way imaginable. And it means going beyond just reading or viewing a webpage. You may want to create an RSS feed or a Google Gadget for a site, take a site’s content and put it on a map. Whatever you want to do, however you want to mold the web, Dapper can help you do it.

By creating a Dapp (web service), you can browse to find the page you want. Use their virtual browser to add similar pages from a website into your basket. For instance, if you want to build a Dapp for Google search results, enter http://www.google.com and then perform a few searches, adding each search results page to your basket. You can also have Dapplications which are web-based services that use Dapps. Here are some Dapplications that have been created by the Dapper community.

Snag - aggregator of information from accounts at various social networks in one place

Blotter - graphs of blog statistics where the popularity information is gathered from Technorati

Fidget - wodgets showing random movies of one’s favourite bands and artists

And there are numerous other Dapps already available there.  

You can think of a Dapp as a “black box” which represents a specific type of page on a specific website on the Internet. The Dapp returns the content of that specific webpage in a format of your choice. Basically, the whole web becomes your playground.