Thing 10 - Mashups should be on your Radar

Mashups should definitely be on your radar, especially if you are doing research. Mashups are a way to look at different ideas by combining them. It's a great way to bring together API's such as google, youtube, flickr, twitter, etc.

Here is a neat example where you can map all your friends using the API's of facebook, google maps and amazon - http://people.emich.edu/mchiang4/MapYourBuddies/ . With this mashup I am able to see how close Thag's cave is to mine and how many days walk it is to Trog's place without separately typing in their addresses.

There's a great site http://www.programmableweb.com/mashups in which you can look at almost 5000 mashups out there, you can submit your own and even learn how to do one yourself (provided you know some coding). You can search mashup's by topic and if you chose one they will also give you some related ones. It's fun to check this site out. There are some of the pretty cool mashups out there. Lots of ingenuity and creativity. You can seriously spend eons going from one mashup to the next.