Mashups and their uses in web design
In our Mashups Industry Insight session we examined the growing trend towards using mashups in web design. Mashups are the combination, manipulation and aggregation of two or more different sources to information to offer an alternative (and often more interesting and improved) service.
To illustrate how mashups work, Industry Insight presenter Anthony Askinazi introduced the group to parkatmyhouse.com: an eBay style market place for car parking spaces that features a combination of mashups and functionality, including:
- Location based user generated content
- Mashup with local amenity data sources
- Consumer to consumer and business ecommerce transactions
- Data sharing
What data do you have for a mashup?
- Store locations
- Real time/live information e.g. cricket scores
- Video and audio content
- Articles and news content
- Product catalogue
Why would someone want your data for a mashup?
- To compliment their existing site content
- To increase advertising revenue (Google adsense)
- To generate affiliate income
- To become an unofficial ‘microsite’
How is the data distributed?
- RSS feeds
- Widgets and mapplets
- XML data feeds / Web services
- Allow or encourage scraping of data
The benefits of mashups
- Mashups encourage third party usage and countless back links/references to your site *They increase awareness of your brand
- They add value to your existing data
- Mashups contextualise your existing services
- They increase interactivity
- They reduce development and consultancy costs (no need to duplicate existing content)
- Mashups leverage the online community to help develop new applications (free outsourcing of research and development)
Examples of mashups
Google Search (www.google.com)
Includes film times, currency conversion, searching the entire Internet, local amenity data, traffic congestion etc
Mapdango (www.mapdango.com)
Google Maps, Weatherbug, Flickr, Wikipedia, Eventful, Google News
Nestoria (www.nestoria.co.uk)
Google Maps, property data, census data, parking data, Flickr, Transport for London
Flickrvision (www.flickrvision)
Google Maps, Flickr
Parkopedia (www.parkopedia.com)
Gumtree, Craigslist, Google Maps, local amenity data, user generated content, government data