Mashups

Today morning, I attended the Microsoft BPIO workshop (Business Productivity Infrastructure Optimization ) at Microsoft Innovation centre in KISR. This was one of the rarly professional workshops I had. During the session the Swedish instructor Ulrika Leufvén (Picture below) gave us example on collaboration product called: Popfly, which is consider as one of WEB 2.0 technology called: "Mashup Creator". So I decided to talk about Mashups.

In technology, a mashup is a web application that combines data from more than one source into a single integrated tool; an example is if we want a website displaying all crimes happened in Miami on a map?! So we can link the crimes database to Google Maps!! and we will get one map graph having red dots on it?! thereby creating a new and distinct web service that was not originally provided by either source. This called Mashups.

Live Examples of Mashups

1. Chicago Crime website contains the previous example which I mentioned. You can browse crime by street for instance.
2. Yahoo Pipes

Content used in mashups is typically sourced from a third party via a public interface or API, although some in the community believe that cases where private interfaces are used should not count as mashups. Other methods of sourcing content for mashups include Web feeds (e.g. RSS or Atom), web services and screen scraping.

Many people are experimenting with mashups using Amazon, eBay, Flickr, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo APIs, which has led to the creation of the mashup editor.

Where Mashups Came From?
It is originally referred to the practice in pop music (notably hip-hop) of producing a new song by mixing two or more existing pieces.


For more information, watch the following clip: