Moving from APIs and Remixable Elements to Mashups

Abstract

Now that you understand the pieces that go into mashups (remixable elements such as a rich URL language, tags, and feeds—all the subjects of Part 1) and APIs (the subject matter of Part 2), this chapter teaches you how to get a feel for how mashups are created from their pieces. To learn how to create mashups, you should study a lot of examples of mashups. In the next chapter, we will work out all the technical details of how to create a specific mashup. In this chapter, we’ll step back to look at a broad range of problems that can be addressed with mashups. I won’t work through all the details of how to create the mashup, but by thinking about a variety of problems—how others have created mashups to solve the problems themselves or related ones—you can learn about how to create mashups, what’s possible, and what goes into them.