Mashups

Today I took advantage of the flickr geotagging service and I assigned locations to all my photos there. Now there is a map for each of them indicating the location.

The reason why I did it was the mashups. I have read that these geotags are actually in such mashups, so what is a mashup ? As far as I understand it is a web application built on the basis of services provided by other applications. Currently the most popular service providers are Google Maps (more than 50%) , Flickr and Amazon. I expect that YouTube and eBay will increase there share as well.

My expectations of the apis provided by these companies was that they will be compliant to the W3C Web Service Specification. I was surprised when I saw that SOAP was supported by very few of the services. Every service though supports REST. Obviously it fits better in the context of mashups.

These apis can be used not only in such mashups, but in every other site (Pedja's mashup). I think that in the future we will not be able to specify which web site is a mashup and which is not.

And in the end a cool mashup site: Video Ranking.

More about mashups at programmableweb.com.