Mashups both for prosumers (a new term that I had first heard from Clare Hart at the “Buying & Selling eContent” conference) - high-end consumers and creators of content and for scripters (my own term since I am not sure what exactly to call these high end-users - for example the departmental Excel gurus that create and manage departmental Excel scripts and templates).

The search for tools that empower these domain experts to create applications without programming has been around since at least the 80s (i.e.  4th generation programming languages) - which led to various new forms of application creation - but the only one that has really evolved into a “general use”  corporate tool for non-programmers has been Excel (though not really a 4GL). The reasoning behind those tools was to put the power to create appplications into the hands of the domain expert, and you will get better applications, faster. One new evolution of these types of tools are Domain Specific Languages (DSL) that make programming easier by focusing on a specific domain and building languages that are tailored to that domain.

So much for the history lesson - but what does that have to do with Mashups and  Situational Apps?  Well they both focus on pulling together different data sources and combing them in new ways in order to discover new insights. Mashups seem to be the preferred web term, Situational Apps is a term coined by IBM for the same tyoe of application in a corporate setting.

These types of applications (and application builders) have a lot in common:

1. They all start from a data feed of some sort. either RSS or XML.

2. They focus on ease of use over robustness.

3. They create allow users to applications easily to solve short term  problems.

Many of these tools are experimental and in the Alpha or Beta stage, or are Research projects of one type or another (QEDWiki, Microsoft Popfly, Yahoo Pipes, Intel MashMaker, Google Mashup Editor). As these tools start maturing, I think we will see a layered architecture emerging, especially for the corporate versions of these tools.  Here is how I see the corporate architecture layers evolving (click on the chart to enlarge it):

I think the layers are pretty self explainatory, except for the top-most Universal Feed Layer which is simply an easy way to use the new “mashup” data in other ways (e.g. other mashups, mobile).

If you look at the stack there are players in all layers (though most of the mashup tools I mentioned above are in the presentation and mashup layers), and the stack as a whole competes very nicely with a lot of current corporate portal tools - but with a much nicer user experience - one that users are already familiar with from the web.

One important issue that is sometimes overlooked is that mashups require feeds - and even though the number of web feeds is growing, there is still a huge lack of appropriate feeds. Since most mashup makers rely on existing feeds they have a problem when a required feed is not available. Even if the number of available feeds explodes exponetially there is no way for the site provider to know how people would like to use the feeds - so for mashups to take off, the creation of appropriate filtered feeds is going take on new importance, and the creation of these feeds is going to be a huge niche. Currently “Dapper” is the only tool that fills all the needs of the “universal feed layer” - site independence, web based and an easy to use, intutive interface for prosumers and scripters.

Stumble it!

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 7th, 2007 at 1:18 am and is filed under Integration, Israel, Mashup, Startups, VC, Venture Capital, Web 2.0, enterprise 2.0, strategic. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.