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Google Office To Get an API
Orange Crush writes, "Google's new office applications, Docs & Spreadsheets, will provide APIs for custom apps. Johnathan Rochelle, project manager: 'We definitely want to build out APIs, especially for the spreadsheets side, as spreadsheets are more data-oriented, but maybe also for the word processor. People will be able to do mashups with our tools for other things, and not be stuck behind our dev cycle for everything they want. If I've already got data somewhere you can't really rely on manual cut-and-paste to make it collaborative. Imagine pulling data from any application you've already got in use... you get that data over to the hosted app, make it collaborative, then bring it back... that's what we'd like to enable at some point.'" Eating their own dogfood: Rochelle said that "Everybody in [Google] is using the tool" already.
It just sounds fucking stupid. When something is mashed, it's mutilated, destroyed. Goddamnit.
So... what are the alternatives?
Yes, I know you don't want to use "synergistic combination" due to endless and satirised-in-dilbert abuse by PHBs, but it's sometimes actually correct, at least if the result is better than the sum of its parts.
How about just "mix"? It's accurate, has long-established DJ connotations and is therefore adequately cool (certainly cooler than "mashup", for pity's sake, which sounds like a painful accident).
How about "synthesis" ? Again, it's accurate, and could be contracted to "synth". I made a synth of foo, bar and blah... It also sounds a bit like "synergy" without being synergy.
But "mashup"? Mashup just sounds dumb.