Aging Buzzwords

Powazek kicked off a good thread yesterday about the growing uselessness of the term “user generated content.”

This got me thinking about another buzzword in a similar situation: mashup.

How can somebody with a blog named Mashalist complain about the term mashup?  Well, the discussion – and my thoughts – have evolved. 

First, I have no complaints about the verb mashup. My problem is with the noun. There are too many different “mashups” out there for the word to have any specific meaning.

When sites like Housingmaps and Chicago Crime began popping up about a year ago, mashups were mostly standalone applications independently developed by the type of people who would go register them on John Musser’s fantastic site. Some of these early mashups function as tools, others are actually content. 

Things are more complex now. Yesterday we learned that Google is integrating its maps with Real Estate listings from Google Base. (Could this be the work of Mr. Housingmaps, Paul Rademacher?) 

Mike Pegg called Google Real Estate a mashup, and the tool certainly fits the Wikipedia definition. Still, Google Real Estate is very different from the original Housingmaps – or any mashup that would appear on John Musser’s site. Google controls the data and the application does not stand alone.

Other companies are testing mashups (enterprise mashups), but even in this limited corporate universe there are a lot of different experiments (Fidelity housing maps ?!?). 

At the opposite end of the institutional spectrum, some of the original independent mashups (Frappr and Wayfaring) have taken on a social angle and grown into much more than an single page dependent on outside data and applications.

It’s exciting to see mashups rooting off in so many different directions, but as the range of applications grows, it becomes harder to speak generally about mashups. 

This is particularly true for business models. Greg Linden, Peter Rip, Richard MacManus and The Times all raise good questions about the viability of mashups as businesses. At the end of the day, the answers to their questions depend on the circumstances of specific mashups.

Part of me feels a little cheap guzzling up buzzwords and spitting them out after only a few months. On the other hand, I think it’s a good sign. It means the conversation is becoming more specific and we’re forcing our language to do the same.

Comments

[Mike Pegg]

I'm pretty careful when I use the term and I really try not to wrongly call something a mashup if it isn't. For example a map tool like the gmaps pedometer isn't a mashup, it's a tool. I call anything that "combines" one or more data sources a mashup. In this case I suppose I'm substituting 'combine' with mashing-up.. I would still maintain that data sitting in Base and mashing up with Maps is still a mashup.. only in this case Google is the mashup creator with 2 of its own apps..

[Rick Burnes]

I agree -- it makes sense to call data in Base mixed up with Maps a mashup.

My point is only that Google Real Estate is very different from a lot of the independent mashups we see (especially from a business standpoint).