What are Web mashups and what technology makes them possible?

What are Web mashups and what technology makes them possible?

A web mashup is a Web page or application that uses and combines data, presentation or functionality from two or more sources to create new services. The term implies easy, fast integration, frequently using open APIs and data sources to produce enriched results that were not necessarily the original reason for producing the raw source data.
Mashups composition tools are usually simple enough to be used by end-users. They generally do not require programming skills, they rather support visual wiring of GUI widgets, services and components together. Therefore, these tools contribute to a new vision of the Web, where users are able to contribute.
Web mashups combine the capabilities of two or more online applications to create a hybrid that provides more customer value than the original sources alone.
With Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), programmers are able to get the tools needed to pull data from different websites and combine it with other information to make an entirely new Web service. As a result, the web is becoming a collection of capabilities instead of being collection of pages. It is allows programmers to create new services quickly and inexpensively.

Why would Google and others allow their software to be combined with other software?

In May 2007, Google introduced Google gears, an open source toolkit that allows users to easily integrate Google applications such as web search, chat, maps, calendars, scheduling, and advertising into web sites.
For large web players, such as Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and others who create plug-in program modules, mashups enable them to distribute their brand names across the web at no cost. Frequently, advertising opportunities will result. For example Google AdSense advertising can be placed into our website to display web ads with just a few lines of code.

What is the potential benefit to consumers?

- to create a better user experience
- To gain business insight and allows them to do their job more efficiently. The example given is IBM Mashup Center which allows employees and customers (even those people with non technical background) to create mashups by remixing information from different sources, such as spreadsheets, dAtabases, applications and unstructured text from an email, video and audio.
- make it easy for business to create “digital dashboard”, web pages that pull together data feeds and information needed by managers to monitor their company’s performance.
- mashups infiltrating the news business.
Twitter becoming the fastest way to find out what’s going on in the world. TweetNews uses twitter as an index for determining the importance of breaking stories, which are indexed by the BOSS search engine (Yahoo’s open Build Your Own Search Engine). As a result, it creates search engine mashups that tracks breaking news stories ranked by Twitter search results. With twitter’s API & the open BOSS search engine, it allows less than 100 lines of code required to build this mashups in about a week.
- driving down the costs of building web sites and applications which in turn, drives down the cost of web entrepreneurship, the cost of initial financing, and increase a number of new Web applications that can be built.

If mashups ultimately make money, how will the revenues be divided?

Mashups definitely generate revenues although they might not directly generate the cash. A powerful mashup between two websites can create / increase traffic for both two websites, traffic means benefits in website industry. If a website has a busy traffic, advertisement slots can be sold easily, products can be sold more, etc.
The auction website giant, eBay, encourages websites owners to mash-up with them in order to generate more traffic to eBay. Website owners who affiliates with eBay (e.g. by putting eBay’s advertisements on their sites) and brings traffic to eBay will get paid significantly by eBay. In this case, website owners are not sacrificing anything except some spaces on their sites for eBay. So ‘affiliation’ is one of the ideas of how the revenues can divided.

Why would mashups be supportive of contextual advertising?

Mashups likely to cause an eruption to e-commerce tied to local destination. The advertising industry is looking for ways to contact customers when they are seeking local addresses. Google or Microsoft map mashup can easily direct customers to local restaurants and sites. Potentially, there are billions of dollars of e-commerce revenues waiting to be developed by local advertising that occurs just at the right moment for consumers.

Example of mashups:

- The fastest growing type of mashups are Geomashups, which combine maps with specialized niche information & knowledge. Example of this is “My Maps” that released by Google in 2007. Users have created over 15 million customized maps.
- www.healthmap.org > a site that provides a global mapping of current infectious disease.
- www.chicagocrime.org > Uses Google maps to display where crimes occur in Chicago.
- www.plaxo.com > A non map based mashups. Provides the integration of contact information including built in calendars & schedules
- www.bookburro.com > Allows users to compare book prices based on the Amazon’s API and other screen scraping tools that scour the web for other book sites’ prices.
- www.indeed.com > Which pulls job listings from many different job sites and organizes them by city.
- YouTube plugin, allows to search Youtube and add the video into a website.
- Greasemonkey (firefox add-on) > Allows users to install scripts on their computer that customize the way  a web site works on a specific computer.