Thursday, December 20, 2007

The Raw Ingredients of a Good Mashup

I got an email a few days ago confirming my new Google Mashup Editor account. I haven't had time to play with it very much, but it is basically a front-end/toolkit for creating web mashups.

I know-- what's a mashup, right?

A mashup is when you take features from two different web sites and blend them in such a way that it forms a new, and arguably, superior result. There are already hundreds of mashups in existence, but the most popular kind of mashup appears to involve GoogleMaps.

So, here I am, with the best toolset yet to create a mashup-- and I can't figure out which ingredients to use. I don't want to do a retread of the same stuff that's already been created, but my knowledge of all the APIs, RSS and Atom feeds, web services, etc. is so tiny that I can't even think of two elements that would be a logical choice to mesh together.

So, I found a web site called The Programmable Web that lists something like 20 million different APIs-- and now I'm drowning trying to figure out what each one does.