The growth of mashups continued throughout 2006
Dion Hinchcliffe says…
“One of my favorite Internet stats to check out are the mashup and open API trendlines on the front page of Programmable Web. Consistently, month after month this year and right up until present day, we’ve seen the mashup stats climb intriguing steadiness. And along with hundreds of available Web APIs, we’ve also maintained a sustained rate of approximately three brand new mashup applications being released per day. Interesting growth, but is it the start of a major trend?
The fact is that the majority of mashups aren’t taking the world by storm quite yet though sites like Zillow show off the potential best. But more and more functionally useful composite Web apps continue to come out and the promise continues to grow. Sometimes it seems that we are potentially witnessing the rise of a brand-new application development model; one based on the concept of building applications primarily out of the content and functionality of other applications.
However, as with most new phenomena, the actual direction that mashups will take is unclear. But the questions that come out about all of this do at least sound pretty important:
Does the rise of mashups signify that meaningful software reuse is here at long last?
Are most mashups really just toy applications with little sustainable long-term value?
Will mashups become a valuable tool to unleash the potential of SOAs in the enterprise?
Will consumers start to clamor for ways to connect their fragmented collections of data together?
Do mashups the leading edge of a new era of very well integrated, yet loosely coupled systems?
Are users tired of being the integration point for most of their software?
It’s too early to answer these questions though the broad outlines do seem to be coming together.”
OA by Dion Hinchcliffe is here