Libby Hemphill research and posts on social media, collaboration, and related technologies

A love letter to mashups

Seriously, I love mashups. I love that they're called "mashups". I love that people make so freakin' many of them. I love that they have such potential to make the world more interesting and usable.

If you're not familiar with mashups:
Mashups are web applications that combine data available from multiple sources into one view. They often rely on open APIs from the data sources (API = application programming interface - essentially a set of functions, rules, etc. that a computer program makes available so that other programs can talk to it).

If you are but haven't seen any good ones lately:

• MashUpComing - Upcoming! and Yahoo! Maps
• LivePlasma - Amazon's media products and the relationships among them, a recommender system on steroids (a descendent of musicplamsa, that rockin' music recommender system)
• Flickr Sudoku - Sudoku + Flickr images of numbers (my mom says it's harder than "regular" sudoku because she got used to recognizing the patterns of her own handwriting and system font, and the Flickr photos don't present such patterns)

To find mashups you can love:
Programmable Web Mashup Directory - 2560 of 'em as of this writing