Mashup? Got Gravy?

Mashup? I heard the term for the first time today. And being close to lunch time, I immediately thought about mashed potatoes, homemade with butter, sour cream and garlic - yummy~ OK, enough of that. Seriously, mashup does provide the gravy with some lumps!

Mashup defined by www.answers.com is "A mixture of content or elements. For example, an application that was built from routines from multiple sources or a Web site that combines content and/or scripts from multiple sources is said to be a mashup. The term became popular in the 2005 time frame." In other words, mashups are unique site that uses data from two or more other web sites to add value to both of them. (aka: multi-tasking web sites)

An example of a website that uses the mashup concept is http://www.housingmaps.com/ . Houses for sale advertised on craigslist.org are injected into Google Maps, allowing users to see the location of properties they are interested in.

Another mashup is http://www.markovic.com/markovic.com/ebay/search.php which allows a person to plot Ebay items on a Google map.

Mashups, being a fairly new phenomenon, provides interesting information (the gravy) but also comes with some issues (or lumps). According to an article from New Scientist Tech by by Paul Marks, dated May 12, 2006,
www.newscientisttech.com/article/mg19025516.400 , mashups are a hackers 'dream come true' because security is rarely considered and the information may be incorrect or false.

Ron Musser of www.programmableweb.com/ is well respected in the area of tracking and providing information about mashups. On the homepage to the lower left are links to popular mashups on topics such as dating, crimes, maps, photo, shopping, animal, new, celebrity and more. A wide variety of topics with many links to interesting sites.

Personally, I've found while researching the topic of mashups, that I will most likely will not search one out because it's a mashup, but will notice if it is a mashup once I am on the site. As far as security, I discovered that it only costs $60 a year for an SSL certificate that authenticates a server. Seems like a small price to pay to improve the issue of security. As with most new concepts with the internet and computers, the bugs need to be worked out and issues will be around as long as the internet exists. Be aware!