Defining Mashups
Developers are getting creative, taking APIs from multiple Websites and merging them to form new, innovative applications that generates a new term called mashup. Over the last year, the term mashup has become very popular not only in the consumer software space, but also in enterprise software. This blog is around what we mean by a mashup.
The following are the definition of term mashup:
1. on Wikipedia:
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A mashup is a website or application that combines content from more than one source into an integrated experience.
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2. on Webopedia
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The term mashup refers to a new breed of Web-based applications created by hackers and programmers (typically on a volunteer basis) to mix at least two different services from disparate, and even competing, Web sites. A mash-up, for example, could overlay traffic data from one source on the Internet over maps from Yahoo, Microsoft, Google or any content provider.
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Characteristics of Mashups
- Mashups are user-focused, i.e. they are primarily created by the user for the user. They are not the product of some developer or IT guy writing a lot of code
- Mashups can be performed on the client side and on the server side.
Content used in mashups is typically sourced from a third party via a public interface or API. Many people are experimenting with mashups using Amazon, eBay, Flickr, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo APIs, which has led to the creation of the mashup editor.
In my next blog I will give an example on the mashup using one or two API.
What do you think? I am really interested to hear other opinions and thoughts around this.
December 2, 2007 at 4:00 am
Microsoft have its own Mash Up editor called POPFLY. It’s still into its beta stage. You can check this out from http://www.popfly.ms/Home.aspx
Yahoo! PIPES is another one.
December 2, 2007 at 7:27 pm
In the era of Web 2.0 mashup is a nice topic to talk about. I just wanted to add some info about a mashup builder application “QEDWiki”, which I have seen on a google video. Actually it is a nice presentation to understand the features of mashup and is a good example. Wanna see the video – goto – http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=9165363107926767145&q=mashup&total=16914&start=10&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=7
February 18, 2008 at 7:30 am
Try this http://www.swivel.com/
May 30, 2008 at 10:00 am
[...] So… for this project I have looked at what we want to achieve, what we currently do, what we could improve, and how we can use technology to help us achieve our learning outcomes in a spectacularly engaging fashion. This has resulted an approach which is centred on learning through technology, rather than technology “transmitting learning”. Why do I say this? Because we had to go through a process of conscious thought about what we actually need and want. We had to be creative, we had to educate ourselves as to what was possible, and then we have expanded this with our ideas. We didn’t decide on a piece of technology and ask ourselves how we could make it work. As it turned out we decided on many pieces of technology all in one place, known as a “mash-up”, defined here on the Servitium technology’s blog. [...]