At this post I will talk a little bit about what is a mashup and why they are so great. To create a new mashup you need a couple of APIs (application programming interfaces), maybe from providers like Yahoo, Amazon, eBay, YouTube and Google who provids APIs. All of these different companies are putting APIs on the internet which internet-developers can access. So let’s say you are an internet-developer and you access the API for where singles live in your neighborhood and you access the Google-Maps API and put them together, then you get a map that shows you where each of the singles live in your area. That’s a mashup because the developer is taking APIs from multiple websites, mash them together in a way that forms a new innovative application, that was never before on the web.
The ambition is that more APIs are provided on different websites and more of these APIs are taped by new innovative mashups. There are up to 20 new innovative mashups per day.
One of the reasons why they are growing so fast is that they are easy to develop. You don’t have to be a professional programmer to tab your creativity to create something innovative like a map of where all the singles in your place and you want to meet somebody. By the way, this mashup already exists from a company called frozenbear.
We have many of these mashups and a lot of new APIs are coming online all the time. Mashup is the fastest growing application ecosystem in the world today. The APIs are available to all developers. The more mashups are developed, the more users of the internet see them and more developers add new applications in the fast growing application ecosystem.
In a nutshell, this application ecosystem is growing very fast and becoming an important thing for programming new applications. It’s unimaginable to work without Mashups these days.
By Rüdiger Ziemelis
