Mashups

Terminology always interests me and so I am currently investigating the confusion of terms and the concepts behind 'mashups' and what they might mean to me and my use of social networking software (most of which I think are mashups). I come to think of mashups as a sort of the remote electronic version of a Swiss Army Knife.

So ... you take a couple of applications you want to combine and mash-them-up together. Ideas such as YouTube and Google Maps work together really well and allow you to patch videos on to a map showing origin or association ... Google Maps is good at mashups! Wikipedia has a good article on it pointing out some of the 'useful' ideas and my mind is working on getting to grips with the potential.

It seems to me that the idea here is to 'adopt, adapt and then innovate' or 'mix, match and mutate' might explain it better.