Mashups for Dummies

Find a mashup to enhance the communication between you and your customers. Perhaps you are a delivery company and want your drivers to have a mashup of your inventory combined with maps that show the best routes for delivering your goods. Popular mashups those including mapping, photos, news, and shopping.

Find out what awaits you in the mashup world. Get a feel for the variety of mashups out there by visiting the Mashup Dashboard on Programmable Web. See mashups from global terrorist threat areas to BusinessWeek combined with LinkedIn to Google Spreadsheets Viewer.

Once you have your idea, you need to select your API (Application Programming Interface), which is the main source of your data. So if you are using maps, then you would use Google Maps and if you're using products, perhaps eBay. Other APIs include Twitter, Amazon, del.icio.us, Flickr, and YouTube.

Consider your programming skills and if you know this is not your forte, find a mashup editor such as Microsoft Popfly, Google Mashup Editor, JackBe, Yahoo! Pipes, Dapper, or QEDWiki. Using an editor, you can drag and drop your content and fine tune your mashup in no time.

Select a hosting company that offers support for scripting languages like PHP, CGI-Bin, and Ruby of Rails. Many mashup hosting companies offer low cost monthly services from $4.95 at month, free domain names, and shopping cart support.

Once your mashup is hosted on a server, you'll still need a license key for your API. Also, if your mashup is on your main website, you'll also need to obtain another key. For instance, Google Maps e-mails a key which will provide you with support, documentation, and blog access.

Download code from other mashups in your business sector to see how you can incorporate what already works well. For example, you can get the Faceforce mashup which uses Facebook information with Salesforce.com data to produce a comprehensive picture of business contacts and connections.