10 Things You Should Know About Mashups

Its OK to think of Google as the godfather of mashups—the company gets credit for a lot these days. Perhaps the bigger story is that more and more businesses are thinking about the potential of mashups. Following are 10 things you should know about

The Frankenteins of software, mashups are applications that pull multiple pieces of data, or even entirely different applications, and assemble them into one piece of software to derive more value.

Mashups are propelled by Web APIs, client-side scripting, RSS content, wikis, AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XM) and social networking environments.

Mashups are driven by the need to get something done more efficiently. By combining multiple sources of related information, users gain a more holistic view of a topic. For example, wikis, RSS feeds and blogs might be rolled into one comprehensive corpora

The Splice Mashup Platform from startup Xignite lets programmers build mashups by taking Web services from Xignites portfolio or integrating Web services from other providers to create customized Web services.

While Splice is a mashup development platform for programmers, IBM’s QEDWiki enables end users to easily intergrate various pieces of software into one application—simple, and even fun, mashup creation.

Another mashup application for end users is Microsofts Popfly, arguably the prettiest of the mashup bunch. PopFly consists of online visual tools for building mashups and a social network where users can host, share, rate, comment on and remix creations

Mashups wont solve all of your data needs, and throwing together apps from multiple sources can actually create more confusion. Know what you need before you implement a mashup.

The next few years will see some considerable growth in the mashup world, but beware the consolidation factor as large vendors look to pick off smaller vendors to fill in application development gaps in their portfolios.

The mashup market is so young that research firm Gartner doesnt even have a Magic Quadrant for it yet. Gartner does expect 30 percent of companies to use mashups in the next year. People interested in creating and consuming mashups need to shop around fo

In addition to consolidation, expect to see new products, partnerships and even some failures in the mashup market.

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