Mashup Patterns

Archive for January, 2011

One of the core issues I’ve observed in the mashup space is that no matter how many mashup-powered solutions I build, the general discipline doesn’t seem to get the credit it deserves. Sure, users are happy to get new products quickly, but I’m finding that I have to educate new teams on the benefits of mashups each and every time. Where I work, our internal mashup awareness level is near zero outside of IT.

You might argue that end-users shouldn’t know or care about mashups. Were mashups fit to be created only in the corridors of IT, I could agree with this view.  But part of the power of mashups is giving control to end-users to craft their own solutions. This is never going to happen if mashups dont get more recognition.

To help improve the visibility of mashups, I concluded my talk by proposing a set of open “Made with Mashups” icons I am releasing under the Creative Commons license. Lest we forget, many of the technologies we take for granted today raised their awareness by taking a similar approach:

 My hope is that by starting to brand our mashups, we can increase the general level of awareness of mashups, regardless of the underlying implementation technology. Please browse over to this page to view the complete collection.