In this chapter, you studied three major examples of mashups: Housingmaps.com, Google Maps in Flickr, and the LibraryLookup bookmarklet. I chose these examples to illustrate some commonalities and differences you will find among mashups. By posing a number of analytic questions (What is being combined? Why are these elements being combined? Where is the remixing or recombination happening? How are they being combined, in terms of the interface and behind the scenes in the technical machinery? How can the mashup be extended?), you saw a repeated pattern:
Data is extracted from a source web site.
This data is translated into a form meaningful to the destination web site.
The repackaged data is sent to the destination site.
There are important differences among the various mashups, specifically in where the integration happens and what is being integrated. For instance, Housingmaps.com is a server-side application, whereas the mashing up of GMiF and LibraryLookup occurs within the browser.
Now that you have a sense of how mashups are constructed and what they are used for, you’ll turn now to a study of the individual services and sources of data that can be recombined.