What’s a “mashup”?
New words are constantly being coined on the Internet and one that is now occurring more frequently is “mashup”. Personally, I find this to be a rather infelicitous name, reminding me of the way a four-year old might talk about how he eats pudding, as well as sounding too much like “smashup”. Be that as it may, “mashup” and its more conventional sounding relative, “Web 2.0″, are being touted as the coming thing. So, what is this harbinger of the future? According to Wikipedia
A mashup is a website or web application that seamlessly combines content from more than one source into an integrated experience.
Content used in mashups is typically sourced from a third party via a public interface or API. Other methods of sourcing content for mashups include Web feeds (e.g. RSS or Atom) and JavaScript includes.
Now, that definition may leave you still wondering what a mashup is. David Berlind, one of the cheerleaders for mashups, has a blog entry explaining in considerable detail what he means by ” mashup” and why he sees the “Mashup ecosystem poised to explode”.
I may think the name is lacking but the concept is a very important one. Who knows? Maybe the long-discussed “thin” computer may be actually arriving. Big guns like Google and Yahoo have the resources to do a lot of interesting things. Even Microsoft is trying out Web applications with its so-called “Live” applications. Added later: It seems that there is a lot of confusion about what Microsoft means by “Live” aplications, even at Microsoft. I now gather that these are not Web applications.
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