Greg on Mashups

Greg makes a good point: are mashups really the wave of the future or just toys that will never be more than demos?

I keep hearing people talk about as if companies are creating web services because they just dream of setting all their data free. Sorry, folks, that isn't the reason.

Companies offer web services to get free ideas, exploit free R&D, and discover promising talent. That's why the APIs are crippled with restrictions like no more than N hits a day, no commercial use, and no uptime or quality guarantees. They offer the APIs so people can build clever toys, the best of which the company will grab -- thank you very much -- and develop further on their own.

The BBC recently launched backstage.bbc.com which is designed to be a source of data and a community base for people happy to mix it all up. It is very overtly a place for the Beeb to get good ideas fed back to them (which is good when you remember that the corporation is a public entity). On the other hand, the commercial examples are, as Greg points out, making offerings with no guarantees. In fact imagine the following example: data is made freely available; everyone throws in their idea; whenever a killer app emerges, the data is suddenly no longer free (I believe Alexa has been very open about this strategy). Now what do you do with your users?

Greg:

There is no business model for mashups.  If Web 2.0 really is just mashups, this is going to be one short revolution.