Mashup Patterns

Archive for February, 2010

It’s happened again. I guess we could have predicted it fairly easily. Once Google, Microsoft, OpenKapow (openkapow.com still exists as a landing page to learn more about Kapow Technologies commercial products), and Zembly shuttered their public offerings, more were destined to follow.

I’m a bit surprised at Mooshup; it seemed popular. But then so was (is?) Dapper and they had to move their product to the side to pursue a more commercial approach (kudos to them for keeping their site up, though!). To be fair, WS02 still remains commited to their mashups products as well. But supporting a community is tough. Trust me, I know firsthand since one of my side-projects is running localendar.com, which has over half a million registered users and hundreds of thousands more anonymous ones.

In my mind, this leaves two main tool-centric communities standing: Yahoo Pipes and JackBe’s Mashup Developer Community. They’re not dead yet! Pipes is definitely still getting love from Yahoo!; I see they recently resolved their dispute with craigslist and are able to pull in their RSS feed again. And MDC just made a bunch of enhancements along with putting a new manager in place (I know Jess is totally committed to growing a tool-agnostic community in addition to supporting her company’s product, Presto)

I still intended to blog on mashuppatterns.com (which many of you know I’d like to move off Ning b/c of spam), but I also think it’s important to start being more visible in those other places. I encourage you to participate over at those other sites with me. I get the sense we’re right in the trough of disillusionment, and we might have more of a rough patch coming up before enterprise mashups go mainstream (again).

This is why I strongly support the Open Mashup Alliance and it’s goal to establish open standards in this space. The last thing you want to have happen is to place a huge bet on a single product/vendor only to have them fold and leave you without support or a migration path.