What's Your Mashup
There seems to be an exploding hype cloud around the concept of mashups. I’ve even seen it suggested that Mashups are the evolution of Web 2.0 in many ways - the hype is being transfered from AJAX to Mashups, or something to that effect.
Problem is, I don’t see the viability. Richard MacManus has an interesting post on this subject. As he notes:
To put it bluntly, data owners hold the balance of power in this new world of Web mashups. Some data owners, like Google and Yahoo, provide formal APIs and are careful to explicitly define restrictions on what external developers may do with their data. Some data owners, like craigslist, don't provide APIs and are more implicit and arbitrary about whom they allow to use their data.Either way the fact remains that data owners can easily block off the air supply for mashups, either with a business decision (as in the craigslist-Oodle case), a policy update for an API, or by simply changing the data or technical rules around it.
Source: Web 2.0 Explorer, “Mashups: who’s really in control?”
However, this argument doesn’t quite go far enough. There are two obvious situations that would lead to you to bar access to a service:
- Cost - This is the one that Richard pegs. If it's costing me loads of cash and not extending my brand, reach, value, etc, then you're not useful to me - you're a parasite.
- Competition - This is, seemingly, the bigger flag for me. If you are a competitor that is leveraging my data to create your own service or to marginally extend my service, I'm more inclined to see you as a threat.
If I view you as competition, there’s little you could do to assuage me that I should still have access to your data. On the other hand, if you’re simply costing me money, what if I wanted to charge you? This is where my main problem with mashups rests. Mashups aren’t making money. Consider this summary from MashupCamp:
or many, that more productive place was the "Monetization and business models" of mashups session. At least 65 swarmed into the room for approximately 90 minutes of talk about how to make money with the custom applications.There ended up being no consensus, other than on how to define the various categories of mashup creators and identify which ones were likely to generate income in one way or another.
If there is a sustainable revenue model AND mashups can navigate the seas in such a manner to not step on the toes of ALL parties they merge, they just might be able to survive. That’s a lot of CAPS if you ask me.