Web Mashup - A new breed of web application
A web mashup is a web page or web application that uses or combines information from one or more sources and presents it in a completely new way as a service.
As the internet is continually growing more open and social, many websites have opened their API that allows developers to grab the content, which has led to a variety of interesting mashups. Then the developers can combine them together, and mashup the content to create a new web service that meets different needs.
The Google maps API is a very popular interface to use in mashups. It can be combined with another stream of data to create some new application. For example, The ChicagoCrime.org Web site is a great intuitive example. The Web site mashes crime data from the Chicago Police Department's online database with cartography from Google Maps. Users can interact with the mashup site, such as instructing it to graphically display a map containing pushpins that reveal the details of all recent burglary crimes in South Chicago. The concept and the presentation are simple, and the composition of crime and map data is visually powerful.
Flickr API that exposes photos sharing offers us another interface for mashup application. Because these content providers have metadata associated with the images they host (such as who took the picture, what it is a picture of, where and when it was taken, and more), mashup designers can mash photos with other information that can be associated with the metadata.
Nowadays, there are many tools available that enable us to develop the mashup application even without coding. Yahoo Pipes is a powerful composition tool to aggregate, manipulate, and mashup content from around the web. Microsoft Popfly is another service does mashups.
Mashups provide us a new and exciting idea for web application and can also reduce the massive amount of duplicate information on the internet. However, there are still social issues that need to be taken into consideration such as intellectual property, fair use of information and date integration between organizations.
