Mashup Patterns

Fellow New York CTO Club member Dan Woods has c0-authored a book for O’Reilly titled, “APIs: A Strategy Guide”. Since APIs are the lifeblood of mashups, it seemed only appropriate to do a review. I’ve posted it over on SearchSoA:

http://searchsoa.techtarget.com/answer/Wheres-the-ROI-in-a-public-API

One issue not covered in the book (which Dan and I briefly discussed) is the resistence to API development I have seen in large organizations. For example, management will argue:

“I can’t afford to take the time to expose our team’s assets! We have to meet the requirements of our specific business users”
-or-
“I can’t risk our systems slowing down because other teams are leveraging our API”

These are comments straight out of silo-ville. This is an example of management thinking more about protecting a fiefdom of data and functionality rather than working for the good of the entire firm.

Yes – there are instances where security or “mission-critical” issues override the desire for an API. But in my experience the amount of systems that could potentially be opened up is far greater. A closed application inventory hampers innovation and -by extension- is a negative impact on the firm.

Dan’s book takes on the API issues at a non-technical level, and has been useful in helping me educate managers to see the benefits of opening up their products to outside collaborators.

For the past several months I’ve been blogging over at SearchSOA, in absence of any major advances in the world of mashups. In fact, it seemed that even as the tech industry as a whole continued to move towards the APIs that make mashups possible, it had abandoned the notion of mashups as a new development paradigm. Within the past couple of weeks there has been a veritable explosion of mashup-related announcements that demonstrate otherwise.

Item 1: Microsoft Re-Enters the World of Mashups

I totally did not see this one coming. After Microsoft shuttered Popfly, its own mashup environment, I had assumed their flirtation with mashups was over. Yet from out of nowhere comes ExcelMashup.com, a platform for mashing together excel workbooks and public APIs.  Clearly Microsoft has not abandonded mashups and now sees Excel as a means to drive their creation. I recall a 2008 Web 2.0 Expo talk given by John Musser, founder of ProgrammableWeb, where he predicted Enterprise Mashups would be the Excel of our era. In his prescient way, it looks like John might have been closer to the truth than he thought!

Item 2: An Enterprise-worthy Open Source Mashup Tool

The good news continued with the release of Convertigo’s Enterprise Mashup Server Community Edition (press release )

I have always felt that the mashup community needed to get traction with the open-source community in order to be successful in enterprise environments (I had high hopes for the Open Mashup Alliance). Obviously, people could always manually connect various APIs and code an interface around the results, but even a small amount of tooling can accelerate this process dramatically. And using a mashup product like Convertigo CE can expose this discipline to a much broader class of non-developer. Convertigo CE has 4 main functions:

• Connectors — for any SQL, REST, SOAP, RSS, ATOM or Microsoft Excel file;
• Sequencer — combines, orchestrates and exposes new REST, SOAP or JSON services;
• Gadgetizer — feed portals with services and widgets for Microsoft SharePoint, Oracle Web Center, IBM WebSphere portal or any open source portal;
• Mobilizer — build and deploy cross-platform mobile native or web applications for iOS, Android, BlackBerry and Windows Mobile.

I used an earlier version of Convertigo (along with tools from JackBe and Kapow) at a Web 2.0 presentation I gave on mashups and it was very powerful. I plan on testing the Community Edition and posting an in-depth review in the future.

Item 3: If This… Then That…

The last announcement comes in the spirit of web-based mashup creation tools like Dapper and Yahoo Pipes. “If This then That” (http://ifttt.com) is a new site that provides a way to mash services together to perform simple, specific tasks. For example, “IF it is going to rain, THEN send me an SMS”. The condition would use a weather API to check the forecast for your area, and then an SMS API to send you a notification if needed. These types of simple automated tasks are the equivalent of the parameciums of the mashup world, and yet the site is hugely popular and tens of thousands of these tasks have been created by the community. As I wrote in my post, “Dumbing-down Mashups: A Good Thing?” the spread of simpler mashup products like ifttt is ultimately what allows a more complex ecosystem to develop. Non-developers will be casually drawn to a site like ifttt at home, fall in love with it, and ultimately demand similar capabilities in their workplace.

From this USA Today article comes the story of a Johan Bollen, a professor at Indiana University who has authored a book on extracting sentiment information from Twitter.

Bollen analyzed the text of daily Twitter feeds (9.6 million in total) over a nine-month period in 2008 with two mood-tracking tools. One simply measures whether the daily tweets were positive or negative. The other tool sought to measure human mood states by categorizing tweets under six terms equated with different mood types: calm, alert, sure, vital, kind and happy.

He claims that using this technique allowed him to anticipate Dow stock prices 3-4 days later with 87% accurracy. I havent looked at the study in detail, so I don’t know if he’s measuring the overall movement of the DOW, or specific issues.

Mining Twitter sentiment seems to be all the rage. Streambase recently announced a feed based on Twitter sentiment, and Thompson Reuters’ Open Calais has offered similar features for a while now.

What’s news here is not that these techniques are being applied.. I wrote about a similar mashup last June. No; the thing I think is interesting is that you are now seeing this approach become mainstream.

I’m certainly not the first person to advodate this approach, but I gave clear examples in Mashup Patterns (back in 2009) of using this technique to get “Advance Knowledge of an Industry’s Performance” and to “Spot the Underlying Causes of Trends in the Housing Market”. Besides market performance, I wrote about how firms could use these techniques to uncover issues that might threaten the reputation of their brand (or of a competitor’s).

Between Innovation and Commoditization lies a Competitive Gap

Like most innovations, there is an “S” curve that takes you from humble beginnings to ubiquity. The gap in-between these points is where you can create a competitive advantage. I think this latest news demonstrates that Leading Indicator mashups are nearing the right side of this chart.

Firms are perpetually caught in a struggle between experimenting with new products and tools that can give them an edge in their market, and playing catch-up with companies that have proven-out new ideas and deployed them more quickly.

What’s interesting about Mashups is that while some applications of the technology are clearly moving to the commodity stage, many others are not. And “Enterprise Mashups” as a discipline unto itself is definitely still down to the right of the chart.

“Managing Innovation” may seem like an oxymoron, but firms should recognize this maturation curve and try to move items along it more quickly. This helps maximize the time they can enjoy the competitive advantages the new technology yields.

For the “Leading Indicator” pattern, I think that window is closing quickly (if it’s not already closed). But there are still large problem spaces where mashups can offer new and valuable solutions that will help you leap ahead.

Having a little trouble posting directly from my iPad (from my top-secret vacation spot lol) so I’m going to punt from my regular mashup exposition and direct readers over to my latest podcast on SearchSOA:

http://searchsoa.techtarget.com/podcast/Application-mashups-and-data-migration-in-the-cloud

It’s a short discussion of some of the risks of using external SaaS and Cloud services, and how mashups can help.

In my most recent post over at SearchSOA (Mashups and mobile: A match that makes sense) I wrote a little bit about how mashup technology can be used to migrate existing web and desktop apps onto a mobile platform.

Part of the inspiration for that article came from my own mobile-mashup experiment. I’m in the middle of writing an iPhone app which exposes a neat mashup I wrote. So I’ve been busy tinkering away on my new Mac, the first computing device from Apple that I’ve purchased in more than 20 years.

By the way, if you want to get up-and-running on iOS or Android devices quickly, I strongly recommend you take a look at Appcelerator’s Titanium framework.

Another product I came across while deciding what technology to use to build out my idea was something new called Moofwd. What is it? Well, according to their web site, it’s a mashup development environment and a rich-client platform that  supports Blackberry, Android, iPhone, WindowsPhone 7 & Java devices.

They dont seem nearly as mature as Titanium (which is not specifically targeting mashups but nonetheless comes with some examples out-of-the-box) but I have reached out to them to learn more about their offering. After spending a couple of posts on the failure of mashup companies, it’s good to see some fresh blood trying to carve out a niche for themselves.

I’ll take a closer look at both products in the future and share some more of my experience building my first iPhone mashup as well as the infrastructure I had to put in place behind it.