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.
