What is a mashup?

Hi, I'm David Berlind, Executive Editor at ZDNet. Today, we're going to talk about what a mashup is. Mashups are a really cool new breed of applications, but to understand them, you only have to look back to history and look at your existing computer, and it's a very good model for what mashups are. So here's a computer and it's running an operating system like Windows. Now operating systems are really nothing more than a collection of APIs, or application programming interfaces, that developers use to build their applications, and it's also a user interface-for example, the keyboard and the mouse that you use to get at the different applications.

So these are all the APIs, and one API might be for example to access the network that the computer is connected to. Another one might be to access the display. These APIs make it a lot easier for developers to build their applications. In the old days, developers used to have to say where every dot had to be placed on the display. Today they only have to say, give me a window from this coordinate to this coordinate, and suddenly magically the window appears.

Those are what APIs do. They do all of the heavy lifting. Maybe you have to access the file system. So you've got all of these APIs here. And this is pretty much the way a computer works. You have your display here and you've got an application running in a window over here. And the guy who developed that application usually taps about 3 or 4 different APIs, maybe a bunch more, to build that application.

This is the way computers have traditionally run over the long-term. But, now let's replace Windows, the operating system, with internet. And as it turns out, we have a bunch of companies now providing these APIs. So for example, we have Yahoo providing an API. We have Google providing APIs. There's a company called EVDB, it's a database of events that are about to take place and it tells you where and when to go sign up for those events. There's also Amazon and eBay. There's a company called Technorati All of these different companies are putting APIs on the internet that internet developers can access.

Now, let's say you're an internet developer and you access the API for where crimes took place in your neighborhood, and you access the Google Maps API, and you put them together and you get a map that shows you where each of the crimes took place in your zip code. Well, that's a mashup, because the developer is taking APIs from multiple websites and merging them or mashing them together in a way that forms a new, cool, innovative application that was never before on the web.

Now, what's happening is more APIs are showing up in this direction, and we're seeing more of these mashups that tap these different APIs show up, too. All of these different mashups are showing up at a rate right now of about 2.5 mashups a day. Over time, this is going to go up to about 10 mashups a day, probably within the next year, by 2007.

Ten mashups a day-one of the reasons that they're going so fast is because they're easy to develop. You don't have to be a C programmer to tap your creativity and create something cool and innovative like a map of where all the recent crimes took place, or where all the open parking spaces are, something that a company called ParkingCarma does in the Bay Area of California. Or maybe you have a map of where all the singles are in your neighborhood and you want to meet somebody. That actually exists, too, from a company called FrozenBear.

We have all these different mashups showing up, new APIs coming online all the time, and pretty soon the growth of this ecosystem is going to outstrip the growth of any previous operating system-based ecosystem that ever existed before. Windows, for example, you had to be a programmer to build applications for it. Linux, Macintosh, doesn't matter; this is the fastest growing application ecosystem in the world today.

It's going to only get faster, and the great thing about it is you don't have to go through anybody to put a new API on the internet. For example, before with Microsoft's Windows, you had to go through the Director of Product Management at Windows to get a new API added into Windows. Same thing went for Macintosh. Now you could add an API to Linux because its open source, but it wouldn't be generally available to all developers.

The advantage here is once you add an API to the internet and you don't have to go through anybody to approve that, then it's available to all of these developers. It doesn't matter which mashup they're developing. All of them can access all these different APIs, and it will just fuel more mashups.

The more mashups we have on the internet, the more internet users are going to get used to seeing them as the new breed of application. And the more users see those as a new breed of application and start using them, the more developers are going to start adding applications into this ecosystem. It is the fastest growing ecosystem on the internet. You'll be hearing a lot about mashups over the next couple of years. Stay tuned.