Mashalist

West-Coast Mashup

Wow, look at all the people at Mashup Camp. And it’s not just hipsters from startups – lots of folks from IBM, Intel and other ... institutions.

I wasn’t able to make it, but after scanning the registration list on the wiki, I’m surprised by one thing: East-Coast media is way under-represented.

There are people from Washingtonpost.com and Salon.com, but unless other folks haven’t listed their affiliation on the wiki, that’s about it. I don’t see anybody from NYTD, Viacom, NBC/Universal, Reed or Hearst. The companies they spend all their time worrying about – Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL, IAC – are out in force.

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.

Gawker Stalker

This is one of the best implementations of mapping on a news site or blog that I've seen. It's well designed, and (most importantly) it fits perfectly with what people are doing on the rest of the site. It's not mapping because we can and it's cool, but mapping because it makes a more robust story. Nice job, guys.

Atlantic Rail Yards Map

This map (via gmapsmania) is a great example of mashup journalism. It's not a tool, it's a story about an issue that's important to a community.

Michael Arrington on Mashup Business Models

Michael Arrington makes a good case here for businesses that act as intermediaries between API providers and mashup makers.

Consumers, Consumers, Consumers

Umair writes:

Web 2.0 cannot live up to its (enormous) potential to create value that's structurally disruptive until and unless technologists understand consumer dynamics.

Same goes for online journalists.

Mashups are going to add a fantastic new dimension to news reports – but only when we figure out how consumers want to use them.

Michael Gartenberg and Barry Parr make a similar point in a recent Jupiter Poscast.  And Adam Green touches on it in this podcast from MashupCamp.

Every few weeks we’re seeing new examples of mashup journalism. This Dutch crime site is a good recent example.

But while sites like this demonstrate the potential for mashup journalism, they don’t fit consumption patterns the way articles, photos, videos – even podcasts – do.

How do we build mashups that are as intuitive and useful as traditional forms of content?

This is one of the questions we’re asking at Faneuil Media. We don’t have an answer yet. I don’t think anybody does.

The Value of Mashup Content (Not Tools)

Peter Rip asked some great questions last week about businesses based on mashups. None of the problems he pointed out are insurmountable, but all are important. Most are issues Theo and I are encountering as we build Faneuil Media.

Of the four questions Peter asked, the first is the most important: How does a mashup business add value?

To answer this question, you need to distinguish between mashup content and mashup tools.

Tools are mashups that people will want to use over and over again. Just like the web applications they’re built on, mashup tools are designed to help people find and organize information. Housingmaps.com is the classic example.

Since they serve the same role as their underlying APIs, I’m not sure how mashup tools add value.

Mashup content is different. Mashup content tells a story that’s relevant to a particular time and place. These mashups are functionally distinct from their underlying APIs – they’re built to communicate an idea, not transfer data.

Our map on NYTimes.com during the NYC transit strike is a great example. It’s a mashup that helps users understand the mood in New York that week. You can read about a woman riding a stolen two-seater bicycle from the Bronx to Wall Street. Or the bliss of crossing the Brooklyn Bridge on foot early in the morning.

In this case, the value of the mashup is clear: it’s the story.

I think the business of mashup content will be similar to the business of blogging. It’s a new medium that allows thousands of new content creators to pull together pieces of the web and express their vision of things. Many of the stories they produce will be unique, and valuable.

Flickr Photos From Turin

IHT.com launched Faneuil Media’s latest project today. It’s a gallery of flickr photos from the Winter Olympics in Turin.

Check it out and let us know what you think.

A New Milestone: The Enterprise Mashup

It happened quietly, but the technology world grew at least one buzzword richer last moth: Meet the enterprise mashup, a mashup for enterprise software.

There’s no Wikipedia entry yet, but there’s no question, "enterprise mashup" is for real. There’s already a conference session planned.

I’m not big on the semantics of web versions, but this is a term worth noticing. I think it’s a milestone in the evolution of mashups.

Judging by mainstream media coverage like this piece in The Times and this one by the AP, most people are mildly amused by mashups.

On one hand, hundreds of developers building maps of breweries and UFOs is great filler for Friday afternoon airspace. But when you get down to business on Monday morning, how can anything with a name like mashup be anything more than a temporary software obsession?

Talk of enterprise mashups is an indication that while mashups can be whimsical, irreverent and useless, the movement as a whole is important.

Phil Wainright and David Berlind are doing an excellent job explaining why. As David put it in an important post last week:

When I think about what today's operating systems are — Windows, OS X, Linux, etc –  I mostly seem them as collections of application programming interfaces (APIs) that give developers easy access to resources (displays, networks, file systems, user interfaces, etc.)….The computer that we've come to know and love is quickly becoming a thing of the past (thus, the "uncomputer") and quickly taking its place (and drawing developers in droves) is a new collection of APIs (this time Internet-based ones) and database interfaces being offered by outfits like Google, Yahoo,  Microsoft, Salesforce.com, eBay, Technorati, and Amazon (as well as smaller private enterprises, governments, and other businesses)….Barely a day goes by where some new mashup — the creative merger of one or more of these APIs with each other and/or with a public or private database — doesn't appear on the Web.

The term enterprise mashup, which looks like it was coined by Phil in this Jan. 10 post, is a sign that mashups will eventually be used for more than just measuring your morning jog. Eventually they’ll be used for CRM software, content management systems and countless other mission-critical pieces of the new web.

In their piece back in October, The Times wrote about mashups, “Why are people doing this? The flippant answer is also the honest one: because they can.”

That was a fair assessment four months ago. Now there’s a different answer: People are building mashups because they make their products – their CRM software, their real estate listings, the news stories – more useful.