ProgrammableWeb has released a list of ‘popular’ mashups, which John Musser calculated from a mix of
click-throughs and user ‘votes’ based on a 1 to 5 scale rating
system. Here are the top 10 mashups according to ProgrammableWeb:
1. Virtual Places
2. Weather Bonk
3. Diggdot.us
4. Flash Earth
5. Adactio Elsewhere
6. Where’s Tim Hibbard?
7. Elicit
8. 2RealEstate Auctions
9. Flickrmap
10. Streampad
All the usual API suspects are included in these mashups: Google Maps, Flickr,
del.icio.us, Amazon. I tried out Virtual Places and was impressed that it includes little
old New Zealand. Here is my hometown of Wellington:
I’ve been checking out mashups from
other sites too, particularly Ning.com. A couple of
note are Restaurant Reviews
With Yahoo! Maps and Anytown
Marketplace With Maps, the latest version of Jon Aquino’s craigslists-like
mashup.
Also the media companies are coming on board, led by BBC Backstage but also washingtonpost.com recently released an excellent site
called mashingtonpost.com. Some
interesting mash-ups that people have done already on mashingtonpost.com: News Cloud (a tag cloud), Ripped from the Headlines! (a daily news quiz),
world map interface, thumbnail quiz of Arts & Entertainment
stories, and washingtonpost.com search
results via RSS.
This is an exciting time to be experimenting with mashups, whether you’re a publisher,
a ‘user’ or an API-wielding company. As Yahoo’s Matt McAlister put it, “the idea is to make your
content mash up ready and to build incentives for people to use your content.” In that
spirit, I’ve (finally) freed my own RSS feed under the Creative Commons, plus I’m
currently trying my hand at mashups. Anyone can do it, so why not give it a try?
