The first hackathon I attended was won by some very uninspiring use of the last.fm API and some other simple tools. It was basically a dashboard to listen to mu

The first hackathon I attended was won by some very uninspiring use of the last.fm API and some other simple tools. It was basically a dashboard to listen to music and get information about the artists with some geolocation stuff. It was interesting to see them win first place, because to the 'hackers' at the event, the project was pretty lame, but since they were done with the functional part of the project after just a few hours, they could spend the rest of the day working on making it look nice. They clearly had the best looking product of the day, and they won because of it. Second place went to a twitter bot that responded to tweets with jokes. I think that a lot of hackers (or maybe just me) go into these things, especially if they haven't gone before, expecting to win by way of being innovative and smart, only to find that what counts in a world of non-technical judges (ie, the real world), isn't necessarily new ideas, but aesthetics, humor, and more generally, human appeal.