Hi, I'm David Berlind, Executive Editor at ZDNet. Today,we're going to talk about what a mashup is. Mashups are a really cool new breedof applications, but to understand them, you only have to look back to historyand look at your existing computer, and it's a very good model for what mashupsare. So here's a computer and it's running an operating system like Windows.Now operating systems are really nothing more than a collection of APIs, orapplication programming interfaces, that developers use to build theirapplications, and it's also a user interface-for example, the keyboard and themouse that you use to get at the different applications.
So these are all the APIs, and one API might be for exampleto access the network that the computer is connected to. Another one might beto access the display. These APIs make it a lot easier for developers to buildtheir applications. In the old days, developers used to have to say where everydot had to be placed on the display. Today they only have to say, give me awindow from this coordinate to this coordinate, and suddenly magically thewindow appears.
Those are what APIs do. They do all of the heavy lifting.Maybe you have to access the file system. So you've got all of these APIs here.And this is pretty much the way a computer works. You have your display hereand you've got an application running in a window over here. And the guy whodeveloped that application usually taps about 3 or 4 different APIs, maybe abunch more, to build that application.
This is the way computers have traditionally run over thelong-term. But, now let's replace Windows, the operating system, with internet.And as it turns out, we have a bunch of companies now providing these APIs. Sofor example, we have Yahoo providing an API. We have Google providing APIs.There's a company called EVDB, it's a database of events that are about to takeplace and it tells you where and when to go sign up for those events. There'salso Amazon and eBay. There's a company called Technorati All of thesedifferent companies are putting APIs on the internet that internet developerscan access.
Now, let's say you're an internet developer and you accessthe API for where crimes took place in your neighborhood, and you access theGoogle Maps API, and you put them together and you get a map that shows youwhere each of the crimes took place in your zip code. Well, that's a mashup,because the developer is taking APIs from multiple websites and merging them ormashing them together in a way that forms a new, cool, innovative applicationthat was never before on the web.
Now, what's happening is more APIs are showing up in thisdirection, and we're seeing more of these mashups that tap these different APIsshow up, too. All of these different mashups are showing up at a rate right nowof about 2.5 mashups a day. Over time, this is going to go up to about 10mashups a day, probably within the next year, by 2007.
Ten mashups a day-one of the reasons that they're going sofast is because they're easy to develop. You don't have to be a C programmer totap your creativity and create something cool and innovative like a map ofwhere all the recent crimes took place, or where all the open parking spacesare, something that a company called ParkingCarma does in the Bay Area ofCalifornia. Or maybe you have a map of where all the singles are in yourneighborhood and you want to meet somebody. That actually exists, too, from acompany called FrozenBear.
We have all these different mashups showing up, new APIscoming online all the time, and pretty soon the growth of this ecosystem isgoing to outstrip the growth of any previous operating system-based ecosystemthat ever existed before. Windows, for example, you had to be a programmer tobuild applications for it. Linux, Macintosh, doesn't matter; this is thefastest growing application ecosystem in the world today.
It's going to only get faster, and the great thing about itis you don't have to go through anybody to put a new API on the internet. Forexample, before with Microsoft's Windows, you had to go through the Director ofProduct Management at Windows to get a new API added into Windows. Same thingwent for Macintosh. Now you could add an API to Linux because its open source,but it wouldn't be generally available to all developers.
The advantage here is once you add an API to the internetand you don't have to go through anybody to approve that, then it's availableto all of these developers. It doesn't matter which mashup they're developing.All of them can access all these different APIs, and it will just fuel moremashups.
The more mashups we have on the internet, the more internetusers are going to get used to seeing them as the new breed of application. Andthe more users see those as a new breed of application and start using them,the more developers are going to start adding applications into this ecosystem.It is the fastest growing ecosystem on the internet. You'll be hearing a lotabout mashups over the next couple of years. Stay tuned.
