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The power of Mashups explained: Another Desktop usage scenario is moving to the Web

Intel, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, SAP and IBM: All of them are investing to take a dominant market share of the booming “Mashup” trend. From a user perspective the concept of Mashups is rather simple to get:

Desktop Mashups:

“Copy+Paste”, “Object Linking and Embedding” in Microsoft’s Excel and PowerPoint have been - and still are - very successful solutions for content integration. Macro/VBA programming inside Excel plus Excels WebQuery functionality is allowing to create powerful “Mashups on the Desktop”. Central Enterprise IT often would classify these “Applications” as the nightmare of unmaintainable information silos. Business Users appreciate the flexibility to create themselves these “situational applications” that for various reasons (time, budget, priority) would not be addressed by IT. Some Mashup evangelists would not call these applications Mashups because these applications do normally not run against common API’s of Internet services and because specific technologies like “Ajax” are not used.

http://www.apatar.com/for_structured_data_mashups.html An open source Desktop application to create Mashups

Web Mashups examples:

http://www.flickrvision.com/ A great Mashup that is showing new photos on Flickr based on geo-tagging on Google Maps

http://lifehacker.com/software/gmail/lifehacker-code-better-gmail-firefox-extension-251923.php Mashup to integrate the functionality of Google Reader into Gmail

http://www.programmableweb.com/popular A list of popular Mashups

The future of Enterprise Mashups:

http://labs.businessobjects.com/ SAP announced the acquisition of Business Objects just shortly after they introduced with Business ByDesign their web based hosted business application suite. Check out BI Desktop and Business Objects Masher to get an idea of the potential future of Enterprise Mashups.

This article from Google’s Gregor Hohpe about the recent Enterprise Mashup Summit provides a great insight into the market (see also his view of the Mashups Tools Market) .

Tools to create Web Mashups in the future yourself:

http://www.popfly.com/Overview/ Microsoft’s step into the Mashup market. It requires also Microsoft Silverlight.

http://docs.google.com/support/spreadsheets/bin/answer.py?answer=75507&topic=11318 “How to” use Google Spreadsheet to create your own little Web Mashup (as you would have done in Excel in the past)

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/ Yahoo pipes lets you mashup RSS feeds and other content to be used in your own Mashup

http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/ibmmsk IBM’s tool set to let users create Mashups

http://code.google.com/gme/tour/tour1.html Google’s Mashup Editor that can be used by developers to create Mashups

http://www.dapper.net/ to get content from web sites to be used in your own Mashup

http://softwarecommunity.intel.com/articles/eng/1461.htm Intel’s Mash Maker is a tool that will allow everyone to easily create Mashups from inside the browser. Have a look at the videos to get an idea of the power.

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Oktober 20th, 2007 at 9:31 pm and is filed under Proposed Solutions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “The power of Mashups explained: Another Desktop usage scenario is moving to the Web”

Elliot Says:
Oktober 21st, 2007 at 12:13 am
Orchestr8’s AlchemyPoint is also another worthwhile mashup tool. It combines content scraping capability (like found in OpenKapow or Dapper) with pretty powerful browser integration.