Web 2.0: Introduction to Mash-ups

— Published January 24th, 2006  |  by Colm McBarron   |  7 Comments

Mash-ups are web application hybrids that combine two or more web-based information sources to create something new. In this they show the potential of the Web 2.0 techologies and approaches.

Gimme an example

Check out the HousingMaps site. What you see is the polished AJAX functionality of Google Maps combined with real estate listings from Craigslist. Choose a city, say New York, and you can see what’s for rent or for sale based on the location.

It’s a really fantastic result. (There’s no equivalent we’re aware of in Ireland, though Daft does use Google Maps to show locations of its properties.) To get this effect, the developer combined the Google Maps API with an RSS feed from Craigslist.

How does this work, and why now?

Over the last 12 months there has been an enormous increase in the number of easy to use APIs and public web services from the likes of 37signals, Amazon, BBC, del.icio.us, eBay, Flickr and Google. Creating a good API is now an essential part of creating a successful web application – the more developers that use your application the better.

Commercial benefits

Although most mash-ups are done by people just for fun, the commercial implications are immense — from the ability for you to syndicate your content to hundreds of other sites, to the integration of another information source into your own site to make your own content more meaningful.

Some of our favourite local mash-ups:

DARTmaps – An excellent local application which scrapes the Irish Rail site for information about the DART trains and plots their location on a Google map.

DublinTrafficCams – Plots the pictures from Dublin city council’s traffic cams on a Google map.

Some of our favourite international mash-ups:

Geobloggers – This excellent site takes tagged photos of places from flickr and plots them on a Google map.

Aytozon – Combines data from Amazon and Ebay to allow users to compare the prices of products in both.

Our very own mash-up

In order to demonstrate the relative ease with which you can create a useful mash-up, we've created an AA Roadwatch/Google Maps mash-up, scraping data from the AA roadwatch site, storing it, and then converting the co-ordinates to geocodes and plotting them on a Google Map.

We chose AA Roadwatch because it provides up to date travel data but its current map interface is pretty poor - finding out if there are roadworks on the way home is almost impossible.- so we combined it with Google maps. We chose Google maps because of its excellent AJAX interface and backend support. We think the result provides a nice improvement.

It took just over half a day to put this together, which is really very little time considering the sophisticated results. The real challenge with mash-ups is not technical but creative. What will be the next priceless combination we all wish we’d thought of?