Mashed Web 2.0 vs Mashed Potatoes

I think mashed potatoes is more widely known and consumed by the world population than mashed Web 2.0. Just visit any Kentucky Fried Chicken outlets and you will see how many of them are enjoying mashed potato. But ask them about mashed Web 2.0… I wonder how their faces will turn.

Popular or not, mashup webs are gaining much popularity in the Web 2.0 world.

While typical mashed potatoes recipe primarily made up of… well… just potatoes (and salt, cream, butter, milk, salt and pepper), mashup webs are an exciting interactive Web applications that make use of content aggregated from external data sources to create entirely new and innovative web applications.

Traditionally, mashed potatoes comes topped up with just one but popular creamy sauce. Mashups web applications, on the other hand, can take shapes in quite a few combination of traditional data sources, producing quite tasty ‘flavors’ in itself, sometimes simply out of this world, just like some of the Web 2.0 applications featured here at Profy.

Web 2.0 applicatons can generally be categorized in either one or a combinaton of the following genres:

Mapping mashups where all sorts of data (for example property for sale or rental) are mashed onto maps. The limitation is almost endless.

Video and photo mashups are gaining so much popularity. On top of traditional video and image hosting, the possibility in this area is quite interesting. Content providers can make use of metadata associated with the videos and images they host (such as who took the picture, what it is a picture of, where and when it was taken, and more).
Mashup designers can then mash potatoes opsss… photos and videos with other information that can be associated with the metadata.

Search and Shopping mashups actually have existed long before the term mashup was coined. To facilitate mashups and other interesting Web 2.0 applications, consumer marketplaces such as eBay and Amazon have released APIs for programmatically accessing their content.

News mashups makes use of RSS technology. Syndication feed mashups can aggregate a user’s feeds and present them over the Web, creating a personalized newspaper that caters to the reader’s particular interests.

I don’t expect mashed potatoes will ever revolutionize into something of totally different shape and taste in the foreseable future, but I am pretty positive Web 2.0 applications will pop up in many different flavors never tasted by the world wide web customers.

Technology is where mashed potatoes have some hope of matching the rival Web 2.0 mashups. As there are quite a lot of different technologies that can be used for creating mashed potatoes, there are also various technology involved in the creation of Web 2.0 mashups.

Ajax, Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), Representational State Transfer (REST), Screen scraping, Semantic Web and Resource Description Framework (RDF), RSS, and ATOM, just to name a few, are some of the currently available tools for Web 2.0 applications.

I am not going to discuss these tools at length here, but suffice to say there will be a lot more different tools created as the technology for Web 2.0 matures.

Mash potato technologists, on the other hand, will still stick to shiny, stainless steel coated tools in their quest to produce the same old fashioned mashed potatoes. May be Jamie Oliver could think of something to revolutionize the mashed potatoes industry? Who knows…

For now, I am off to Kentucky Fried Chicken for my favourite finger-licking-good fried chicken and mashed potato. See you there!

Source [IBM]

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to profy RSS feed!