Mashup Guide

Two recent entries of note:

• ProgrammableWeb.com » Blog Archive » API News from Where 2.0 is a good pointer to some of the new developments in this space. This week has been is a busy week for developments in online mapping because of such events as the Where 2.0 conference, the Google developer Day, WhereCamp - alternative conferences for geohacker.... It seems that people who have stuff to show off want to wait until these big conferences to announce their advances.
• ProgrammableWeb.com » Blog Archive » 44 Mapping APIs gives a breakdown of the mapping related APIs. It's helpful to have a conceptual framework for approaching this fast-growing area of mapping APIs, especially if you want to look beyond the Google maps API.

In chapter 9, I look in detail at some individual mashups. I also want to know more about mashups in general, to do a macro-analysis of mashups. That is, I would look at the broadest range of mashups to look for design patterns that cross many examples.

One way forward would be an analysis using ProgrammableWeb, probably the single best compilation available of mashups and corresponding APIs available on the public web. There are some patterns that are immediately obvious from a study of the site; I say immediately obvious because John Musser, its creator has surfaced these elements in the interface. Let me point out some of the data about mashups:

• You can get an overview of the mashup world, newly registered ones, what's popular at the Mashup Dashboard.
• "mapping" is the most popular tag associated with mashups, followed by "photo"
• The Web 2.0 Mashup Matrix displays mashups by their use of every combination of 2 APIs in the ProgrammableWeb database.

In addition, to what is obvious in the data, I would like to pose more questions that should be derivable from what is in ProgrammableWeb.com:

• How many APIs are used by the mashups? That is, what's the distribution -- how many use 1, 2, 3, etc. APIs.
• What's the most common pair of APIs being used? Most common threesome?
• Is there any correlation between the popularity of an API and the popularity of mashups that use that API?
• Are there broader correlations among usage patterns of APIs if we cluster them by categories? Are mashups likely to use more than one API in the same category or across categories?

As of the writing of this book, there is no formal API to programmableweb.com -- so answering these and allied questions require some other form of access to the data. I'm working with John to get such access.

I'm working today on the first draft of Chapter 9 "Dissecting mashups and remixes". Ideally, I'd like to create the equivalent of the Gang of Four's Design Patterns for mashups. Such a project is long-term effort. For this chapter, I suggest finding several emerging patterns from an analysis of a handful of specific mashups. I will also outline how we can look for patterns latent in the ProgrammableWeb database of mashups.

Where we can look for analyses of mashup-related patterns?

• Design pattern (computer science) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
• Patterns - Ajax Patterns and the Ajax Design Patterns book.
• design patterns in tools such as Proto Software, openkapow, and QEDWiki

It's very difficult to keep up with the world of public APIs and mashups -- even for someone like me who is writing a book on the topic and teaching a course on the subject! Now that I have a bit more time to work on the topic, I turn now to being more assiduous in my reading of online news sources. My first priority is a consistent read of John Musser's ProgrammableWeb. I already make steady use of its database of APIs and often point others to the Mashup Dashboard when people ask me for concrete examples of mashups. Now I want to keep up with his blog. Today (April 20)'s post concerns Google AJAX Feed API, which is described thus by the Google documentation:

With the AJAX Feed API, you can download any public Atom or RSS feed using only JavaScript, so you can easily mash up feeds with your content and other APIs like the Google Maps API.

Hmmm...I get to a detailed look at Chapter 4 next week on RSS and other feeds. I've written about Yahoo Pipes for remixing RSS. This Google AJAX widget demands a close look too! (Thanks, John, for alerting me to this new development! I also need to subscribe to Google AJAX Search API Blog in my news reader.)