What are some futuristic applications of this?
Web philosophy
"The Web was
originally designed to be mashed up," says Google Web developer Aaron
Boodman, the 27-year-old creator of a program called Greasemonkey that makes it
easy to create and use mash-ups. "The technology is finally growing up and
making it possible."
According to businessweek.com, that's why mash-ups, named after hip-hop mixes of two or more songs, are
starting to rock. Chicagocrime.org overlays local crime stats onto Google Maps
so you can see what crimes were committed recently in your neighborhood.
Another site syncs Yahoo! Inc.'s (YHOO ) real-time traffic
data with Google Maps. Book Burro notices when you're shopping at an online
bookstore such as Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN ), then taps into
several other stores to show price comparisons.
Mash-ups portend big changes for software companies, Web sites, and everyone
online. No longer just a collection of pages, the Web is morphing into a sort
of global operating system, à
Community participation
Mash-ups offer a way
for them to tap the creativity and hard work of the masses, who do the
work and get out the word -- and the software -- through blogs and Web
sites. "We want to encourage community participation," says Paul
Levine, general manager of Yahoo! Local. "It's essentially research and
development and marketing for us."The results are often remarkable. Chicagocrime.org, for instance, combines two services -- a Chicago Police Dept. crime Web site and Google Maps -- and lets you type in an address to see recent crimes nearby. The site attracted 1.2 million page views in just the first two weeks after it began in May. Creator Adrian Holovaty, a full-time Web developer at the Lawrence (Kan.) Journal-World's online unit, thinks there may be a business in mash-up creation.
Potential danger for users
Business week gives us the folowing information : some mash-up software presents a potential danger to users as well. Greasemonkey, an add-on to the Firefox browser, allows the quick installation of software "scripts" to customize the way a Web site works on a particular PC. Crooks could write malicious scripts -- say, to secretly log keystrokes to steal financial data, says Book Burro creator Jesse Andrews. But he thinks the threat can be minimized with software tweaks and peer review of scripts.Google Maps heat map mashup
GeoIQ is an open platform for building intuitive geographic analysis and visualization tools into web-based mapping applications. It gives people a simple and compelling way to filter, analyze and get value from geographic data without ever leaving their web browser. One of the demo apps is a New York vs. San Francisco side by side comparison of demographic data that you can customize.
Interview with Camille on the WebRadioTechnology.com Podcast by Mathieu :
