What it Means to be a Mashup

An anonymous reader writes "IBM DevWorks has provided us with an introductory article that helps define what it means to be a mashup. In addition to just defining what a mashup really is the author also delves into what they do for the community at large and where they may take us in the near future. From the article: 'Mashups are an exciting genre of interactive Web applications that draw upon content retrieved from external data sources to create entirely new and innovative services. They are a hallmark of the second generation of Web applications informally known as Web 2.0.'"

Comments

maybe another term is appropriate?

[macadamia_harold]

Sorry, but this buzzword's taken.
mash up. v. To take elements of two or more pre-existing pieces of music and combine them to make a new song. n. A song comprised of elements of two or more pre-existing pieces of music.

2. I'm in the middle of mashing-up songs by Tom Jones and Michael Jackson. (verb usage)

Mish Mash

[gigne]

This is possibly the most vague article I have ever read.

I didn't manage to learn any more from this article that the Slashdot summary didn't provide.
Although there are sections describing what each tehnology is, and how it would be used, the summaries are vague, and lack any real content. I have written similar non-technical summaries for executive types, and it looked vaguely similar to this.
Reading the README of any AJAX application will tell you 80% of what the IBM article goes into.

The only information I can as being useful is the resource list cited at the end of the article.

Re:Mish Mash

[morie]

What do you mean, "read"?

Where is slashdot going when people actually start to RTFA?

Wow

[YowzaTheYuzzum]

How did they manage to cram so many buzzwords into one summary?

Re:Wow

[!eopard]

Take more than one executive summary and create a 'mash-up' of course...

Re:Wow

[jacksonj04]

I suggest we start using a new 'buzzwordbingo' tag for articles of this nature.

Or

[Aqua OS X]

The remix / combination of several songs.

Mashup 2.0

[Duncan3]

Take 2 dot-com like things with no real business model and put them together?

Web 2.0! Bubble 2.0! Crash 2.0! Recession 2.0!

Enough with the 2.0 already.

Re:Mashup 2.0

[mattkime]

I believe you're suffering from Disillusionment 2.0

-1, Troll

[afaik_ianal]

This article is clearly nothing more than an attempt to get us all complaining about how much we hate buzzwords, and the concept of Web 2.0.

what kind of nonsense is this?!?!?!

[andyr0ck]

ahem! to bloody right the buzzword's taken! i've been saying this for years...

mashup (mash up) V. 1. to get wrecked on drugs of some description. 2. to have violence visited on one's person.

usage: "we were right in the middle of one hell of a mashup and i fell and broke my arm."

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=mas hup

Buzzword Alert!

[obsol33t]

The W3b 2.O Kr3w has to keep themselves relevant by inventing unnecessary words so that they seem ahead of the curve.

8/10 ********

[kahei]

Okay, I award this article 8 out of 10 on the 'Web 2.0 buzzword bingo waste of my precious time scale', which I just invented for that express purpose.

However, there is scope for something interesting here. The 'Web 2.0' thing, and I'm including most of the 'semantic web' in that, is the first example of a groupthink disaster growing and evolving from nothing in the web age. I know there were a few silly ideas (set-top boxes and the like) before, but Web 2.0 has grown in a truly organic grass-roots fashion and could provide valuable insights into why sensible people collectively influence each other to make mistakes.

I'm not volunteering to read through the history of Web 2.0 articles to do that, though, I must admit.

Where I come from a Mashup ...

[Viol8]

... is a cannabis smoking session. Though having met a few web developers in my time perhaps IBM they chose the right name after all!

What a clustermashup

[novus ordo]

"One of the biggest social issues facing mashup developers is the tradeoff between the protection of intellectual property and consumer privacy versus fair-use and the free flow of information. Unwitting content providers (targets of screen scraping), and even content providers who expose APIs to facilitate data retrieval might determine that their content is being used in a manner that they do not approve of."

The biggest problem I see with these mashups, or any kind of application that relies on a third party(TP), is that once you get enough air, they can just take the rug out from under you and offer you parachutes on your way down. It can be as simple as the TP dying or just dropping the web-service that is an integral part of your application, or as complicated as "we don't want you knowing this" or "we think this is illegal." Also there's a possibility that TP will start charging you bandwidth since you are taking up X% and they will need to upgrade their facilities. Add to this the legal uncertainty whether the TP really owns the data being provided and you got yourself one hell of a mashup.

what it means to rename

[Anonymous Coward]

i just love when people give names to things that already have names. this is called a portal, not a mashup. jetspeed provides the means to create such a portal with portlets that pull and optionally transform xml and html and has been around for years.

Re:what it means to rename

[billDCat]

I'm sure I'll get plenty of eye rolling here (and buzzword bingo points), but they are not quite the same thing. While a portal is indeed an aggregation of content, a mashup is a blending of services. I would say that the main distinction is that current Portal products (with a capital P) typically do their aggregation on the server, and spit out the results client side using static HTML pages. While there may be some exceptions, the big ones all currently work in this way. In contrast, mashups work using client-side technologies (JavaScript/Flash) to allow the services to interact without calling for a new HTML page.