Web 2.0 - Mashup and APIs

You must have read ‘iGoogle, making life integrated!’ However, there is not only iGoogle to make your life integrated. Yahoo’s Flickr & Yahoo Maps; Microsoft’s Windows Live are similar kind of web applications who combines all third party data and make it useful at one site.

Mashup is combining data and functionality from variety of source into a single integrated tool. Now, there are many web applications based on this concept. Here are some interesting mashups
1. iGoogle
2. Google Maps, Yahoo Maps
3. Google Reader
4. Yahoo Flickr
5. Windows Live

Fetching information from other sources is generally done using Syndication, Web Services or public APIs provided by sources. News related sites provide RSS, Atoms Syndications; where as applications, services sharing sites use Web Services and APIs. Google Maps APIs, Open Social API from Google and FaceBook markup language are some popular APIs.

Developing a mashup application is creative task now a day. It needs to take APIs from different services and have to create new, innovative mashup which will be beneficial for the user on web 2.0


One of the innovative mashup I found is Yahoo Pipes . Learn more about pipes at http://blog.pipes.yahoo.com/about-pipes/