I was doing some research for a client on Mashups and playing around with Microsoft Popfly to demonstrate creating games and educational apps. Anyway, I stumbled across the Wonders of the World demo by IDV Solutions. Its an awesome demo which uses a new mashup tool called Visual Fusion. The demo shows information pulled from a custom list, then ‘mashed-up’ with Virtual Earth.
I’ve come across the term mashup a number of times over the last few years.. its one of those terms like Wiki which is always a bugger to explain to someone.
Wikipedia defines it as: “A Web site or web app that seamlessly combines content from more than one source into an integrated experience.” basically giving you the user the ability to create/customise your own app or web page with the information you need from a variety of sources.
I’ve seen a ton of examples on the web such as looking at a Google Map, overlaid with geo tagged images stored in photo sharing site FlickR. Other examples are BI dashboards which users can create on the fly. Check out and download Flotzam where your facebook feeds and pokes, blog, twitter, FlickR and Digg feeds can come to you in one place.
Creating Mashups
Popfly is Microsoft's Silverlight based Mashup editor. “The mashup editor in Popfly is a graphical programming environment where mashups are built by connecting blocks together. In Popfly a block is basically something that does something. That means that a block can do anything. So a block could add two numbers together, or it could fetch some photos from Facebook and another block could then display those photos.” More here
You can sign into Popfly with your Live ID and start creating games, web pages and apps straight away.
There are a number of other editors which allow you to create mash up apps and web pages such as Mapano, Google Mashup editor, Mozilla Ubiquity and JackBe.
Hopefully will get a chance to dig deeper, will try and post back any findings.
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