Mash-Ups

Mash-Ups

Definition

"A Web mash up is a new application that is created by pulling together two or more complementary Web-based applications and/or data sources ... The term mash up came from the field of music. A musical mash up is a remix of two or more songs into a new piece of music. " (Patricia Seybold at http://outsideinnovation.blogs.com/pseybold/2006/03/why_mash_ups_ma.html)

Context

Mash-Ups and Remix Culture:

"Creative people these days essentially fall into two groups. On the one hand are the people who create things from nothing, like the singer-songwriter who picks up his guitar and plays a tune. And on the other are the people who use pre-existing materials and rework them into something new, like the DJ who samples part of a record to form the core of a new song. In musical terms, this second approach is traditionally known as remixing. More recently, a new style of remixing has emerged, where instead of repurposing just part of a tune for use in a greater composition, two or more complete tunes are melded together. This new discipline is known as the art of the mash-up. In Web 2.0, the principles of both remixing and mash-ups are applied to content and applications on the web." (http://www.psfk.com/2006/05/understanding_u.html)

Mash-Ups and Software culture:

"Indeed, blocks of interchangeable software components are proliferating on the Web and developers are joining them together to create a potentially infinite array of useful new programs. This new software represents a marked departure from the inflexible, at times unwieldy, programs of the past, which were designed to run on individual computers.

As a result, computer industry innovation is rapidly becoming decentralized. In the place of large, intricate and self-contained programs like Microsoft Word, written and maintained by armies of programmers, smaller companies, with just a handful of developers, are now producing pioneering software and Web-based services. These new services can be delivered directly to PC's or even to cellphones." (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/05/technology/techspecial4/05lego.html?)

Mash-Ups for User Meshworks:

"mashups demonstrate how quickly a “mesh” can form when the process of wiring together components is made easy for the “scripting-level” developers. These higher-level developers and integrators are critical to the development ecosystem: they exist in far greater numbers than formally trained programming professionals, and more often than not they possess key domain expertise – rapidly bridging technological capabilities into real world, valuable solutions.

Clearly as the flexibility and potential of “mashing up” and recombining application components gets closer to someone who understands the user’s needs, the value to that user increases." (http://rayozzie.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!FB3017FBB9B2E142!285.entry)

Examples

A directory of Mash-ups in the form of a matrix, at http://www.programmableweb.com/matrix

Discussion

Advantages of Mash-Ups

Alec Saunders:

"1. Mashups are incremental. You very rarely need to rip out what you already have to use a mashup. In the world of voice, this is really excellent news, as capital equipment costs are considerable. Companies like LignUp and Iperia make excellent platforms to extend existing PBX functionality; Jaduka and Lypp do this with web services.

2. Mashups use a Web architecture, and are naturally scalable and reliable. Common approaches today that leverage PSTN technologies are naturally unscalable and unreliable.

3. Mashups, by virtue of being built upon web services architectures, allow disparate companies to integrate together in low cost and controlled ways. This is true in both the technical and the business sense. You might be familiar in service oriented APIs from Google and StrikeIron that allow you to use their networks to provide data or to get something done. You might also be familiar with Amazon’s or Ebay’s affiliate models that allow them to have massively large partnership channels.

4. Mashups use technologies such as PHP, HTML, Flex and Ruby which are well known to millions of web developers.

5. Mashup projects tend to be small, and are therefore less risky, than other development approaches. When you can simply cut and paste a HTML snippet to allow web callbacks from your intranet, company web site or e-mail - you know the project is small." (http://thethomashowecompany.com/332/what-is-the-big-deal-with-mashups)

A non-technological P2P-interpretation of Mash-Ups

By Michel Bauwens:

"Postmodernism was all about deconstructing oppressive mental structures that we inherited from modernity. Amongst other things the Cartesian subject/object split and the alienating effects of Kantian’s impossibility of knowing true reality; it was a necessary destructive passage, a cleaning out process, but it didn’t, as its names “post"- indicate, construct anything. So in my view, if modernity was about constructing the individual (along subject/object divisions), and postmodernity about deconstructing this, then this new era, which I’ld like to call the era of participation, is about constructing relationality or participation. We are not going back to the premodern wholistic era and feelings, but just as modernity was about rigorously individualising everything, eventually reaching the current dead-end of hyper-individualism, we are now just as rigorously ‘relationising’ everything.

If in premodernity we thought, we are parts of a whole that is one and above us, and in modernity we thought we are separate and unified individuals, a world onto ourselves, and in postmodernity saw ourselves fragmenting, and pretty much lamented this. But in this mash-up era, we now know that all this fragments can be reconstructed with the zillions of fragment of the others, into zillions of commonalities, into temporary wholes that are so many new creative projects, but all united in a ever-moving Commons that is open to all of us..

So the fragmentation of postmodernity is a given for us now, but we are no longer lamenting, we are discovering the technologies (infrastructural, collaborative-software-ish, political, but above all the mental and epistemological) that allow us to use this fragmentation to create the Great Cosmic Mash-Up. That is the historical task of the emerging Peer to Peer Era." (http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/?p=102)