Ambient Mashups

My most interesting souvenir from the ETech conference is a t-shirt from Yahoo! – “mashup or shutup” in says. They’re promoting new development tools they hope people will use to create interesting (and even useful) web applications by “mashing” one set of data with another.

There where several sessions at the conference with “ambient” in the title. It was used in so many ways I had to look it up to make sure I really knew what the word meant – “surrounding; encircling.” I was mostly right. And virtually everything at the conference was, in some way, a mashup or some application of one.

(As a point of reference: a mashup, as I’m currently understanding and defining it, is when you take one or more data sources or tools and “mash” them together to form a new use that may not have been anticipated by the originator). Mashups may be the “next big thing” on the internet… but not something your average user is going to be using — yet. (Microsoft is working on a universal web clipboard that might partially do this.)
The potential is huge. One of the most popular mashups so far is Google maps and Google earth. And now virtually every web 2.0 tool is offering some sort of API.

Mashups are new, but I really think the underlying concepts aren’t. What else is new is the business models (or attempts thereof) for these services offering themselves up for mashing. If I don’t have to come to your site to use your tool… how are you making money? And what about people who mashup a data source or tool that wasn’t intended by it’s author to be mashed up? Yet questions like these certainly aren’t new to the internet world.