tag:,2008:/1/tag:72.47.210.69,2007://1.3633- 2008-07-02T20:25:31Z Comments for Current Mashup and API Trends Movable Type 4.1 tag:72.47.210.69,2007://1.3633 2007-03-23T10:52:59Z 2007-12-16T23:11:16Z Current Mashup and API Trends Web 2.0 has brought us a flock of APIs and the wonderful new concept of a Web mashup. Thanks to apps like Google Maps, del.icio.us and Flickr, we have started to think a lot about remixing the web. In the figure below is a classic example of a mashup - a Twitter Map. This mashup... Alex Iskold http://www.adaptiveblue.com Web 2.0 has brought us a flock of APIs and the wonderful new concept of a Web mashup. Thanks to apps like Google Maps, del.icio.us and Flickr, we have started to think a lot about remixing the web. In the figure below is a classic example of a mashup - a Twitter Map. This mashup uses Twitter and Google Maps APIs to create a new application, which literally puts Twitter users on the map.

When two services like this are put together, it is likely that something interesting will emerge. However, not all possible combinations of services are actually useful. To bring order to the often chaotic world of Mashups, John Musser created a site called ProgrammableWeb that tracks mashups and APIs. John's site forms the basis of much of this post. So let's head over there to find out what the big trends are in mashups and APIs today...

High Level API Trends: Google leads the pack

The API section of ProgrammableWeb shows popular APIs. It also has an interesting scorecard that compares API offerings from web giants like Google and Microsoft. A quick look at the score card reveals that Yahoo! and Google lead the pack in terms of number of APIs - 22 and 20 respectively. Amazon, Microsoft and AOL have roughly half of that and eBay has 4. 

]]> But in terms of usage, Google is far ahead of the pack - 1114 Mashups use a Google API. It is also interesting to note that even though Microsoft has 3 times the APIs of eBay, they both have the same number of Mashups using their APIs.

Also check out the mashup matrix, which gives insights as to how APIs cluster with each other. Each dot in the matrix implies that two APIs are part of the same mashup. One way to interpret the matrix is that a cluster of dots indicates logical belongings of APIs, or a natural fit with each other. 

Analyzing Mashups: Mapping continues to dominate

The Mashup dashboard on ProgrammableWeb contains a lot of interesting statistics about Mashups. On the right, we see the numbers for the past six months. We conclude that mashups have been growing steadily, but not spectacularly. This is not surprising, because creating mashups requires time and more importantly technical know-how.

The figure below shows the distribution of tags for mashups. This is calculated by analyzing the tags across all the mashups posted onto ProgrammableWeb. Mapping is overwhelmingly the most popular category, spanning 43% of all mashups. This is not surprising because it all started with the Google Maps API - and people are still very excited about putting information on a map. Photos, Search and Shopping tags are roughly equal - with 10% each.

Mashup popularity

ProgrammableWeb currently measures popularity by number of views. This is a bit unfortunate, particularly because there is no way to sort mashups by rating. As a result, the most popular mashup - Virtual Places - is one that does not have a high rating. It looks interesting and claims to be sophisticated, but it did not load for me. The second most popular mashup was called Wii Seeker. As the name implies, it helps people find nearby locations that have a Nintendo Wii. It must have been really popular at some point, but now it looks fairly primitive. The next mashup that caught my attention was the one in fourth place called Weather Bonk. This one had a high user rating and was actually very interesting, as it pulled together live weather, historical information, forecasts and web cameras.

Using Delexa for mashup popularity

Next we briefly leave ProgrammableWeb and head over to Delexa, a mashup site that uses del.icio.us and Alexa APIs to show the most popular sites by category. The top mashup tagged by del.icio.us users was Housing Maps, a classic mashup that combines Google Maps and Craigslist to help people find housing.

The second most popular mashup according to Delexa was GeoGreeting, which is more entertaining than useful. This mashup showed geographical locations with buildings that resembled the shape of the letter that you typed. The third most popular mashup according to Delexa was Weather Bonk, the same one that caught my eye on ProgrammableWeb.

Analyzing APIs: GoogleMaps used in 50% of mashups

Back now on ProgrammableWeb and the chart on the right demonstrates the growth of APIs. As with mashups, the actual growth is not that impressive - but it is steady. As of now, there are close to 400 registered APIs. The way that Programmable Web measures API popularity seems to be more objective and reliable than is the case with mashups. The popularity equals the number of mashups that use the API and the chart below shows the distribution of the most popular APIs:

There are few surprises in this information. Google Maps is by far the most popular API, with 50% of mashups using it. Flickr and Amazon are next with 11% and 8% respectively. Also, it's notable that 5% of mashups are using YouTube - which probably corresponds to the recent rise of video aggregators like Vidmeter. Finally, 4% and total of 74 mashups use the del.icio.us API. 

One API that caught my eye was Cloudalicious, which shows the distribution of tags for a particular URL over time. This can be insightful in terms of understanding how people's perception about your site is changing (or not). Check out the del.icio.us tag cloud trend for Read/WriteWeb:

Conclusion

What can we derive from this analysis? It appears that mashups are certainly cool, but they are not burgeoning. The growth has been steady, but not really explosive. This begs the question: why? 

There are several reasons, the primary one being that most current mashups are created for fun and not for business. Enthusiasts with some spare time on their hands are building these during their evenings and weekends, without having monetization in mind. The second reason is that APIs, as with any software libraries, have a learning curve. Certainly Internet companies are trying to expose their services in the simplest possible way, but not everything can be made simple.

Is this what mashups will be - a playground for enthusiasts? I believe that the answer is 'yes'. Even though services like Yahoo! Pipes, Teqlo and Dapper are working to simplify the process of creating mashups, it will likely remain a fairly technical exercise done by enthusiasts. 

However, it is also likely that we will see companies and products taking ideas from many mashups and creating applications with the combined functionality. For example, taking ideas from the best mashups (like Cloudalicious) and creating a set of tools for bloggers and marketers would be very useful. So mashups will, I think, become the labs of the web - where rapid prototyping is done by enthusiasts, which gives rise to more integrated offerings by web companies.

Please let us know what your favorite mashup is and give us your take on where mashups are heading.

]]> tag:72.47.210.69,2007://1.3633-comment:30690 Comment from Johnny on 2007-03-23 Johnny http://www.partygps.com It will definetly be interesting to see how the mashup evolves over the next few years. I think they will get more useful as they become easier to create and use. One thing I noticed is there are many more mashups that are just throw together without much thought or design than the ones that are well thought out.

If you have a moment, check out this mashup using Google Maps at http://www.partygps.com. It is certainly one created for fun and not business.

]]> 2007-03-23T14:50:37Z tag:72.47.210.69,2007://1.3633-comment:30691 Comment from Sandy on 2007-03-23 Sandy http://www.mapmyevent.com/ Nice article. Please visit my site for my piece of mashup work
http://www.mapmyevent.com/

]]> 2007-03-23T15:12:42Z tag:72.47.210.69,2007://1.3633-comment:30692 Comment from John Koe on 2007-03-23 John Koe http://www.exactlead.com I would like to point out that some mashup based on Googl's Adwords API are commercial enterprises. Integration with Adwords API is a big business. this just one example http://www.keycompete.com/ , http://www.spyfu.com (beta), cannot think of more.

John Koe
http://www.exactlead.com

]]> 2007-03-23T16:15:24Z tag:72.47.210.69,2007://1.3633-comment:30693 Comment from Jose on 2007-03-23 Jose Here's another weather mashup, but more aviation oriented: http://www.mymetar.com.

]]> 2007-03-23T18:25:29Z tag:72.47.210.69,2007://1.3633-comment:30694 Comment from Phill Midwinter on 2007-03-23 Phill Midwinter http://www.surrch.eu I love Google Maps, it's the best thing they've done for search since they did search. However I wish they'd stop branching out and would return to improve their core search engine. There is no excuse anymore, and i felt the need to rant on my blog about it about 10 minutes ago quite wretchedly.

]]> 2007-03-23T19:19:05Z tag:72.47.210.69,2007://1.3633-comment:30695 Comment from Apatar Open Source Data Integration/ETL on 2007-03-23 Apatar Open Source Data Integration/ETL http://www.apatar.com Alex, I think there is a disconnect in between the future of cloud computing and the current state of API infrastructure offered to the developers to make use of mashups in the enterprise, there are just not enough APIs outhere to make it happen anytime soon. In five to ten years perhaps.

I recently posted on the issue about enterprise adopting mashup technologies here Three Trends Influencing Enterprise 2.0.

]]> 2007-03-24T01:10:12Z tag:72.47.210.69,2007://1.3633-comment:30696 Comment from Alex Iskold on 2007-03-23 Alex Iskold http://www.adaptiveblue.com @6 Please see my previous post this week about turning websites into webservices. A lot of the APIs will be leveraged by other companies, not necessarily enterprises.

Alex

]]> 2007-03-24T02:37:13Z tag:72.47.210.69,2007://1.3633-comment:30697 Comment from Will on 2007-03-23 Will I think and hope the web is going to drive the development of business mashups. I've been doing integration in large companies and it's way too difficult and proprietary. Thanks to RSS, REST, etc it's apparent that making things simple are usually why things get adopted (as opposed to the drawn out standards that are made way too complicated).
I want to see business applications providing APIs instead of always having to write custom interfaces everytime. Most apps were written for users who log into a gui rather than from a backend web service. For financial reports, they are still being put online as pdf or word docs instead of xml. From what I've seen of XBRL it is WAY too complicated.

]]> 2007-03-24T03:13:44Z tag:72.47.210.69,2007://1.3633-comment:30698 Comment from Byron Binkley on 2007-03-24 Byron Binkley http://www.protosw.com/user/profile/4 Alex - nice analysis. We (at Proto) think mashups will take off when: 1) they are used for business / commercial applications, probably within the enterprise and SMBs and 2) a platform makes it easy enough for end users to 'mix and mash' to do the easy parts but still allow the technical users to 'extend and connect' to services and resources.

We just presented at Under the Radar (http://undertheradarblog.com/) along with Teqlo and Mashery and it is clear that there is an ecosystem developing to support developing commercial mashup applications. From Strike Iron to Salesforce.com, there is interest in recombining data and services to build real business mashups. I think the enthusiasts showed proof of concept, and businesses are now paying attention to the opportunity (so are VCs). So for what it's worth, we think this opportunity is starting to get real legs outside the enthusiast playground.

]]> 2007-03-24T23:18:36Z tag:72.47.210.69,2007://1.3633-comment:30699 Comment from Wade Sonenberg on 2007-03-28 Wade Sonenberg http://acreforum.com/ In real estate, the last year has really seen a big push to integrate Gmaps into all sorts of RE search functions. As for enterprise usage, the MLS Data/IDX providers really come to mind - many of them are getting a pretty penny for adding searchable MLS maps through mapping API's, mostly Google's, although Loopnet adopted MSN's Virtual Earth. We just put up a mashup of Georgia Traffic Count Data which cuts out service providers to the tune of $300 a year. Now that industry groups are looking at mashups like this as a competitive advantage, I believe mashups like MLS map searches will become a must-have.

]]> 2007-03-28T12:05:56Z