On the corporative blog of a friend of mine I saw a link to a curious online resource. ProgrammableWeb is a website containing a kind of a directory for Mashups. For those readers who never head or don’t quite understand the meaning of this term, I give a brief explanation. A Mashup is a website that uses one or more APIs to call and to include the content from external web services. The most popular APIs that are used by owners of mashups nowadays are GoogleMaps, Flickr, YouTube, Amazon, YahooMaps, VirtualEarth etc.

All the mashups I faced so far are built on the same principle. The main functionality is the content provided by the API, for example the maps from GoogleMaps API. The ideas of mashups are often very simple, or there is no idea at all. Just what should one think of such projects as “Where I had my first kiss.” or “Where am I?” (your location is determined by your IP and then shown on the map). These services might seem funny, but I guess only because the APIs are quite new. The class of current mashups I would describe as the test phase. Web developers experiment with the new APIs and set their thinking on what new facilities the new web services open. The mashups of the next generation will have surely more sense. The external content will be used like electricity or heating in the household to provide the necessary functionalities. For example NOKIA invests now a lot of money in development of GPS-based online services. I can imagine, that next year there appears a number of services like ranking system for shops. Those users who will go shopping will see not only the shops on the map, but also their ranking, the opinions of other users, ontology based selection of shops (for instance if you want to buy a tennis racket, the sport shops will be filtered out and displayed to you). So the use of a map API will be a necessity, but still only a way to represent the main content, provided by the website.

I even believe that the term mashup has a temporary character. It will die out quite quickly, cause the projects that realize this idea are only a pure mix of technologies and without a phantasy or further extention they have no future and will simly disappear.

July 1st, 2007 at 3:59 pm | category: General topics, Web sites