If you are ready to Nerd out then this entry is for you. I would like to introduce the concept of Mashups today. What is a mash up you ask? Mashups are when you take two services/websites that have nothing to with each other, and you create a bridge between them to create something totally cool. It's the concept of 1+1=3.
Before you click off this page holding your head let me explain. Take for example Craigs list and Google Maps. Two totally separate non affiliated websites, but because they were built on "Standards" they can more or less speak the same language. The result is housingmaps.com. Now instead of manually looking at lists of apartments to rent, you can see where they are on a map. Amazon.com has a Mashup with FedEx. Now you can track where your order is in real time. Why is this interesting? It is interesting for several reasons.
REASON 1: This week I have been adding pictures to flickr and tagging them with "City, State, Country." The result is my very own picture map. click here to check it out. Now you can look at a map of the world and see where the pictures were taken. All this with no coding and minimal effort.
REASON 2: Mashups are changing software as we know it. Imagine if a company wanted to reproduce my stupid picture map and sell it to people. They would first have to re-invent 2 wheels, 1. Google Maps (good luck) and 2. a photo website. With Mashups you can save yourself a couple years of development time, $$, and create a little code to join the two; VIOLA 1+1=3.
REASON 3:Software being run as a service (think eBay, Amazon.com, Yahoo Mail, etc...) allows the masses to do really powerful things. It's changing the way we live. 5 years ago how would a 16 year old seller of a vase in Bakersfield, CA transact with a random 70 year old buyer in Bethesda NY? How would the money be exchanged, how would they trust each other, better yet how would they find each other? Now with eBay we don't think twice about it. Another example is ITunes from Apple. This weekend Jodi and I were painting and she says, "do you have the new O.A.R. album?" I tell her no, and see a trip to the music store in my future. Instead I log into Itunes, put in my credit card number, 2 minutes and $9.99 later we have it. It was the soundtrack of our Saturday. Now that's powerful!
Tune in next week when I'll explain why Google's Stock is $388 per share and worth every penny.
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