Mashups are an exciting genre of interactive Web applications and it comes under the broader picture of second generation of  web or better known as Web 2.0. Mashups are the creative hybrids when created from 2 or more external data sources and finally produces a new innovative product or services. Nowadays, there are various classes of Mashups being created for various consumer and business purposes. With the growing need, innovation and players, more and more Mashups are coming to our Mashups community.

There are many types of mashups, such as consumer mashups, enterprise mashups, data mashups, and business mashups. The most common type of mashup is the consumer mashup, aimed at the general public.
Data mashups combine similar types of media and information from multiple sources into a single representation. Enterprise Mashups are secure, visually rich web applications that expose actionable information from diverse internal and external information sources.

Mashups and portals are both content aggregation technologies. Though Portals represents the older concepts where the dynamic markup languages play the key part and makes different fragments over the web, popularly known as ‘Portlets’ but with Mashups this becomes a more hybrid way to mix multiple applications (rather APIs) to totally transform to a new creation.

There are different set of technologies available now to create such Mashups and out of that worth mentioning the Web 2.0 technology called ‘Ajax’

Ajax – Ajax is an acronym “Asynchronous JavaScript + XML”. Ajax is a Web application model rather than a specific technology. It comprises several technologies focused around the asynchronous loading and presentation of content:

      • XHTML and CSS for style presentation
      • The Document Object Model (DOM) API exposed by the browser for dynamic display and interaction
      • Asynchronous data exchange, typically of XML data
      • Browser-side scripting, primarily JavaScript

Mashups are certainly an exciting new genre of Web applications. The combination of data modeling technologies stemming from the Semantic Web domain and the maturation of loosely-coupled, service-oriented-architecture, platform-agnostic communication protocols is finally providing the infrastructure needed to start developing applications that can leverage and integrate the massive amount of information that is available on the Web.

If you surf the web, maybe you will not be aware that you actually are browsing over such a Mashup application site. These have become extremely popular and many such are based on Google Maps, Flickr and many other popular apps.

Some more examples for you:

Happn.in – Mashup of Google maps and local Twitter trends from Happn.in. This map will show the top 10 trending phrases in over 80+ major cities around the world.

Twitpickr.com – An easy way to upload your TwitPic images to Flickr. Uses APIs from Flickr, TwitPic and Twitter.

Mp32tube.com – Mp32tube allows YouTube users to easily upload mp3s on youtube.com, as YouTube does not allow this feature.

http://f1gmap.googlepages.com/f12009.html – Displays satellite images of all 2008 Formula One Grand Prix Circuits with race results and grand prix information.

Gympost.com – Fitness facility locator that shows gyms, athletic clubs, pilates studios, and other similar places on a Google Map.

Related worth reading could on Rich Internet Application

You might also like to Read:

1. Web 2.0
2. Flight Tracking using Mashup Apps and RIA
3. Web 3.0
4. Rich Internet Applications (RIA)
5. Playing with Google and Bing Maps