KnowledgeForward

Web governance has been a topic of great interest to me for years now because it’s a topic of great interest to my clients.  This is why we gave governance a starring role in our new Microsoft SharePoint Infrastructure Planning and Governance workshop.

I feel that Microsoft has woken up to the importance of addressing governance when it comes to SharePoint, a piece of infrastructure that is notorious for often being deployed (or evolving) in a wildly ungoverned fashion.  But when I look at the actual guidance being published outside of Burton Group, governance often seems to just mean maintenance.  For example, this CodePlex page on Governance and Manageability is 95% about manageability in my definition.  A site recycle bin? Management.  Splitting larger databases into smaller ones? Management. Arguably some of the other items listed here could assist with a governance effort even if they are not governance themselves.  For example, usage and storage metrics reporting could be used to check against a policy that a division shouldn’t exceed 10GB of storage. 

For many years now I have been putting forth the view that web governance uses people, policy, and process to resolve ambiguity, manage short- and long-range goals, and mitigate conflict within an organization.  Technology only fits into this insofar as it supports a process that is needed to assist with compliance with the Statement of Governance.  The real value of governance is that it helps to pre-decide who wins in arguments before they come to a head (that’s the “mitigate conflict” part of my definition).  Details about how to use the admin console to check for orphaned accounts or apply a template to a series of farms are unlikely to cause frothy arguments and are best left to separate maintenance manuals that can be approved and maintained on a different cycle than the Statement of Governance. 

The reason I get picky about what is governance versus maintenance is that the documents are often created by separate people as part of separate efforts and are on different update cycles.  A governance document may state that it’s important that information on the website be kept fresh, therefore all web pages have to be updated every 180 days.  If it then goes on to describe which tools site administrators should use to run an aging tool or how to set site settings to expire documents then that information is likely to get out of date, be harder to find by admins who don’t want to sort through all the high level stuff, and make the document too onerous for non-techies.  A second reason is that governance documents tend to be lopsided if they are created by techies that like filling it with topics they know a lot about and ignoring high-level, non-technical concerns.  A third reason is that anyone who asserts that they’ve written a statement of governance that just sprinkles a few platitudes about scope, goals, and policy into a detailed manual for maintenance and manageability is going to look foolish when the groups that truly understand governance (enterprise architecture teams or other higher level governance teams that have written higher level guidance) see the results.

(Note: This is a cross-posting from the Collaboration and Content Strategies blog)

I’m done with my Lotusphere postings for now.  I posted my notes from days 1, 2, and 3 in this blog and described what I saw in the Innovation Lab and my overall impressions at the Collaboration and Content Strategies blog.

Make sure you also check out the personal blogs from my teammates Guy Creese, Mike Gotta, and Karen Hobert who also had good posts on Lotusphere.

I’ll leave you with this final shot of the orchestra onstage playing Kashmir for the opening session.

After a late, but fun night with old friends, new friends, and friendly IBM folks, it was a bit difficult getting up bright and early, especially without a symphony to wake me up like yesterday.  But there were some good presentations.  I also had some good presentation with executives from IBM, but those observations will work their way into other blog entries and I won’t post a blow-by-blow bullet list like I do for these

IBM and SaaS

Doug Wilson and Aparatim Purakayastha

• Examples Doug gave of IBM Lotus SaaS:
  • He began by talking about Bluehouse, the code name for the Lotus SMB SaaS program.
  • Also talked about Lotus Foundations, a collaboration server (being released 2q 200 that IBM’s business partners sell as on-prem
  • Lotus Sametime Unyte Share and Unyte Meeting is a product as well as a service that can be cut into other offerings like those from business partners
• I thought Doug’s presentation was interesting for the assumptions it made about the value proposition of SaaS.  I’ll pull these out and isolate them to clarify (so these are my words, not IBM’s position)
  • Traditional software vendors will prefer to offer applications that have a flexible hosting model versus pre-determined hosting model. For example, Bluehouse seems to be COTS software (commercial off the shelf) that IBM has decided to host and customize to offer as a service.  This is different than Google Apps for the Enterprise which were built from the start to be SaaS. It’s the difference between optional SaaS and mandatory SaaS.  IBM Lotus is leaning towards the flexible hosting model - as Doug said “You’ll see a hybrid - it’s not totally one or the other.”    The next question is therefore, is there a difference between applications developed to be purely SaaS versus either SaaS-or-COTS?  My instinct says there is, as this must introduce design limitations, but this will take further research
  • An easy market for SaaS is organizations at a low point on the technology maturity curve.  For Bluehouse, Doug mentioned a sweet spot of businesses that don’t currently do much collaboration, so SaaS is enabling access to capabilities that you can’t get otherwise.  In other words, the buyer is probably not comparing the SaaS to COTS - the choice is between the SaaS and nothing.  This concept is complementary to the one that SaaS offers stripped down functionality as one of its benefits (less complex)
  • Small business are another easy market for SaaS.  Small businesses have difficulty justifying enterprise software and their systems aren’t linked to partners
• I agree with these assumptions, but I do think this leaves out a few value propositions that Doug did not mention
  • Software adoption risk: A typical buy-vs-lease calculation requires the number of years the software will be used.  But for technologies being explored for the first time, it’s not certain if it will catch on.  The time frame could be very short if it never catches on and dies out long before reaching critical mass in an organization.  Collaboration technologies such as wikis and even document libraries are experimental for some organizations, so SaaS can be cost effective versus a purchasing long term rights to software that may fizzle after a few months
  • Vendor risk: Buying long term rights to software from a vendor that may not be around in a year isn’t prudent.  Aside from code escrow allowances, SaaS provides another form of assurance that you’re not paying for a going-concern assumption.  This doesn’t apply to IBM, but it does to many of the smaller Web 2.0 vendors
  • Departmental or point usage: Even large enterprises have needs for small groups within them to set up their own collaborative environments such as for one department or for one project team.  In the Q&A Doug said that IBM Lotus may address that in the enterprise products, although that’s not what Bluehouse is about
  • Quick time to implementation: This ties into the departmental bullet above.  The idea is that if a project has certain software needs that can’t be met with the organization’s COTS software.  For example, a project team needs to collaborate with an external partner.  They certainly can’t wait to initiate a project to explore collaboration software and wait for it to be installed - they want it today
• Aparatim pointed out architectural lessons about what is important for designing SaaS-capable software
  • Loose coupling
  • Federated and open identity systems
  • Application level awareness of multi-tenancy

Glimpsing the Future of the Business of Socializing

Irene Greif and Joan DiMicco

• Beehive
  • Beehive is a research project for mixing work and purely social exchange
  • It’s a social networking website, like an internal Facebook
  • It’s not Connections - it’s opt-in and the profile is self-branding (like placement of where things go in the profile and you don’t just fill in categories)
  • Examples: photos, top five lists, events
  • I think it’s Interesting that Oracle also has a Beehive project for next-gen collaboration, not to mention the Apache Beehive project (unrelated to collaboration).  This is a popular code name!
• Socializing in Virtual Worlds
• Teams are strengthened by playing games
• Leadership emerges from in-world exercises.  it gives people without leadership titles to take on leadership roles and learn and demonstrate leadership
• One argument was that younger people like these immersive environments and we want them to feel comfortable
• Another is maybe to get value to take people out of their work setting to share experiences together.  Using games to foster teaming
• Expect integration with existing, 2D tools in the enterprise
• Talked about some design principles they found from Second Life: were that they should be collaborative games (not single user), team competition, social identity (t-shirts, etc), and exercises to get comfy with Second Life
• Their research showed that it helped foster a collaborative environment in virtual teams
• Bluegrass
• Irene described the Bluegrass project for virtual worlds for software developers.  I sat down in the Innovation Lab with it and it’s pretty neat
• What I like about it is that it demonstrates the value of virtual worlds for visualization.  The same data can be visualized in a “normal” way in Rational Jazz.  You can see projects, people on the projects, when code is checked in, and so forth.  But the virtual visualization lets you see this data in a different way, with trees for projects, people with bubbles over their heads when they take an action, and profile information hovering around them
• This isn’t a virtual IDE - it’s for the collaboration and a way to provide a visual concrete to the programmer’s abstract world
• It was developed in the Torque engine, which has a server and client component
• It was designed by and for millennials - so it has the fun look and feel of games
• Irene discussed other similar projects like MUPPETS, MPK 20, Rubyists in Second Life, Chime
• She described this as connection to attention management in being aware of what other developers are doing

Portal Site Management

J Paul Kelsey

• Described site management as being about managing pages, artifacts, page lifecycle, access, and content creation
• They opened up an ATOM feed into the portal through a content handler that can send and receive XML, so the admin screens for pushing pages out are now AJAX enabled
• Through that they can issue GET, Put, Post, or DELETE requests on a page without going through admin screens
• Can modify all sorts of things to a portal page locally to make changes to it (without ever going to the server) and then a single submit to the server would update it.  I think this could open up some nice 3rd party vendor opportunities for handy page design and admin functions
• Apparently in the past you didn’t have an easy way to move a page from one server to the next.  I thought WCM did that.  Well, now there’s a button you can click to publish pages
• There’s a site management option added to the resource manager portlet
• I’ll admit that I got distracted doing some email during this presentation, so these notes may be a little off. 

That’s it for day 2. 

Here’s what I heard through the filter of what was interesting (or lovably quirky) to me:

General Session

They started out by seriously overestimating the degree of stimulation I am accustomed to at 7:45am. There was a full (about 35+ piece) orchestra plus 7 piece rock band blaring away at songs like Kashmir (Led Zeppelin). They were very good and high energy, but it was a bit too early for me to appreciate that.

Bob Costas

• Used sports (steroids in baseball, Chinese Olympics) to make his point about finding knowledge in the data, getting past information overload by finding the pertinent information

Mike Rhodin

• Mike spoke for the first minute in front of an enormous asterisked phrase stating legalize about “product plans are subject to change …”
• Talked about the types of collaboration as document, people-centric, and community-centric. He then proceeded to play a winning game of buzzword bingo. In fact, the whole morning was buzzword compliant (innovation, composite application, web 2.0, knowledge management, attention management, etc.). I can’t complain though - I use those buzzwords too and he did a good job describing them and putting them in an IBM context (oh yeah, “context” - another favorite buzzword of the morning)
• Mike got applause when talking about going beyond search to discovery. As Mike said, search tells you what you knew to ask for; discovery tells you what you didn’t know
• Announced an IBM+RIM partnership

Dr. Vishal Sikka

• Dr. Sikka is the CTO of SAP and he came out to announce SAP business suite integration with Notes (project Atlantic)
• This replaces the templates that were available since 6.5. Cons: this costs $$$. Pros: supports newest versions of Notes and ERP and it’s supported

Alistair Rennie

• Talked about Notes being ported to Ubuntu and Mac (the public beta begins “now”)
• Domino 8.5 enhancements will include:
• ID management in a server vault
• Opening Domino directory layer
• An attachment store that eliminates redundant files (as 3rd party vendors have been providing up until now)
• Lotus protector for e-mail security (an appliance that does anti-spam)
• Domino designer 8.5 based on Eclipse and Xpeditor
• A class browser in Domino Designer (this got whoops and yahoo’s from the audience)

Kevin Cavenaugh

• Described Lotus Symphony as important because it lets a company move from supporting commodity software to letting it spend on innovation
• Beta 4 in February of Symphony will add programmability
• Brazillian vendor Totvs, which works with Notes to provide ERP, includes Symphony so now their users don’t even need Windows

Bruce Morse

• In 2008 they will add Sametime advanced (expertise location, which he called “skill tap”) and unified telephony (demoed calling to a single number that can be forwarded)
• Sametime persistent chat and file sharing will be added, blurring the line with collaborative workspaces

Larry Bowden

• Claims to have #1 portal marketshare (IDC and Gartner say so). I’ve found marketshare numbers for portal to be increasingly sketchy as it’s uncertain how to count free and bundled licenses (like Oracle Portal and Windows SharePoint Server). I don’t doubt it though - they’ve done very well with WebSphere Portal Server (WPS)
• Talked about the seven accelerators they’ve added to WPS
• Completed integration of Google gadgets
• Today announcing integration with Cognos, Business Objects, and Hyperion
• Next (2q this year) will be mashups and Total Forms
• Demoed Ajax capabilities (instant open comment field, drag and drop) and dashboard framework with drilldowns

Jeff Schick

• Jeff had the most guru-like speech, starting out by talking about the movement of collaboraiton from smoke signals to Usenet to Prodigy
• IBM will deliver combined enterprise content management (ECM) + collaboration. Filenet P8 and IBM CM8
• V2 will include attention management, which seemed to include creating a personalized homepage. Irene Grief is an IBM’er that I interviewed in the research for my attention management document. I found her very knowledgeable and she seems to have had a positive impact. It’s tough to address a concept so broad in a product suite, so I’ll be interested in getting more details
• Did a demo that showed where to focus attention across a social network. Also showed Atlas, which analyzes your social network (like the now-dormant Microsoft Knowledge Network)
• Talked about mashups as a way to easily create desktop apps, bring functionality the last mile, and implied end-user personalization with saying the “P” word
• Announced Lotus Mashups, a browser based mashup tool
• Demoed dragging organization feed onto an org map. Added salary data layer. Also showed connecting 2 wdigets by name so that clicking in one changes the data in the other.

Mike Rhodin

• To the strains of the symphony playing “Fanfare for the Common Man” by Copeland, Mike announced the Lotus Foundations for SMB. Interesting choice of music - not sure if SMB’s see themselves as the common man versus Rocky or rising stars. The Net Integration Technologies acquisition fits in here.
• He also referred to Steve Jobs’ reveal of the new Mac when pulling out an appliance-like server for Domino
• He ended by announcing an extranet SaaS product called Bluehouse for smaller businesses with less than 500 employees

Websphere Portal Technical Overview

Stefan Liesche

• WebSphere Portal 6.1 beta has been out since Sept. 29th and in December was refreshed to beta 2. A few more betas to go before release
• Gave great description of what a portal is. I still hear so many batty definitions that it’s nice to hear it described properly
• Listed Mashups among the things that portals consume. Interesting - I see them as more complementary composite application creation mechanisms rather than something to be consumed by a portal
• He used the “e” word: ecosystem. This is a term many vendors are using now to talk about the set of things around the product itself that enable its success (in the market or for the implementer) such as 3rd party vendors, community, systems integrators, etc.
• Enhanced openness: Access to web, mobile devices, expeditor, and REST (as a service such as one that could describe navigation in a portal, or to a feed reader)
• Briefly talked about the accelerators for WebSphere Portal: self-service, industry, collaboration, content, dashboard, learning, enterprise suite, process
• Lotus connections portlets, Quickr (blogs, wikis, forums), development through composite apps and drag&drop, standards support (AJAX, REST, ATOM, DOJO), semantic tags for dynamic menus
• Client side aggregation is about breaking apart the single page at a time model. Using web 2.0 technologies WPS can enable pages that go beyond single page delivery so you don’t, for example, have to wait for all portlets to render before seeing the page
• WPS now has support for microformats (understanding the nature of certain types of information such as currency or stock symbols and knowing how to provide more detail)
• He talked about integration that can be implemented via Javascript to integrate an external web app into the portal service, but inherit navigation and styles
• I (this is Craig, not Stefan talking) have found it interesting to watch how the concept of mashup gets described and leveraged by vendors. Stefan basically divided into strategic (portal) versus tactical/opportunistic (mashup). That’s pretty reasonable, but the problem with the division between low end and high end tools is that the path to go from low to high end has always been rocky and so many projects that seem quick at first wind up needing enterprise features and scale later
• His definition: “a mashup is a lightweight web app that combined data from more than one source into an integrated and new, useful experience.”
• You can assign a URL fragment to a page to allow for simpler URLs
• Virtual portals can now be identified by the hostname or a path segment
• They now support multiple language versions of the same page and portal server automatically picks the right version based on profile. It uses markup in the HTML to do this
• Talked about business process integration for portal using Business Process Integration.
• The WCM now supports something they are calling paging where it can split documents into pages
• Search has been extended so you can federate other search products in WebSphere Portal Search Center page. While his example integrated with “Dingdong Search” I think he really meant Google
• A quick JSR 286 update: Reference implementation will be provided at Apache Pluto 2.0 with the final version available at the end of 2007
• There were long lists of management, development, and content management features and and APIs that are too big to list here. The slides will be posted up to the Lotusphere site for all the nitty gritty details

For the end of the year, Ross Dawson published a map of trends across society in 2007, based on a train system map. I find Ross’s map of trends to be very interesting for what it says (and doesn’t say) about the areas I cover as an industry analyst: globalization, attention management, and portals.

Globalization is dead center in the middle of the trend graph.  It has 3 lines connecting it to anxiety compared to only 2 lines to happiness (or does the yellow train stop there?).  From my point of view though (content globalization) I noticed that the technology line does not connect to globalization.  But the core thesis of my research into content globalization is that the trend is for information technology’s intersection with globalization is rising rapidly due to enabling technology in the form of enterprise content management, XML standards, and component-oriented content.

Attention management is on the chart in the form of “too much information”.  It is shown as tantalizingly close to “resource scarcity”, which would have formed an interesting parallel to water scarcity and to the orange line below (constant partial attention, slowing down).  I happen to think those are inexorably connected to “too much information”.

Portals get interesting placement in the “personalization” hub in the lower left of the chart.  No less than 7 trains run through that hub including on-demand, fragmentation, wisdom of crowds, constant partial attention, and online medical records.

A fourth area I cover, virtual worlds, didn’t seem to get placement.  Unless it’s counted under “escapism”.  Or “boredom” …

I was recently pulled in as an advisor to a portal strategy consulting project and came up with a quick five-minute questionnaire to get a feel for the situation before our first meeting.  I thought it would be helpful to post these questions up as anyone being thrown into a portal strategy project should have these answers lined up before the initial meeting or get to them in the first five minutes. 

There are tons of question one could ask of course, but in my experience these are the ones that result in the most useful answers most often.  So if I only have five minutes to do a kind of end-user portal request for information (RFI), this is what I would ask.  Once I have the answers to these questions I can engage in a useful conversation about any number of portal strategy dimensions (product selection, infrastructure impact assessment, portal timing and roadmap, portal requirements gathering, portal pricing, portal consolidation and rationalization, portal business justification, etc.).

For information gathering about a portal strategy project I want to know:

Introductory

• What do you mean by portal? To Burton Group, portal products are website factories that aggregate a wide variety of content to deliver dynamic, contextual websites. They provide their users (website builders) with a common set of back-end integration and front-end contextual, dynamic displays that can be used to quickly create websites on a similar foundation. All the websites will share the same infrastructure integration, look and feel, development tools, and management UIs. (from the CCS document “Communication and Collaboration in Portals: Half the Battle”)

Business

• What is the scope of the portal in question (e.g., just intranet, just a dealer extranet, just as a front end for Oracle Applications, intranet for Division X, intranet for the whole company except our subsidiary ABC which was just acquired) and where does it fit into the other portals the company has?
• What is driving you to revisit your strategy at this time? Pain points? New initiatives that need to be supported?
• How much funding have you been given to support the new strategy? Or is the current project being undertaken to determine the funding required?
• Are there specific metrics that you are aiming to improve? Have they been benchmarked before starting on this project?
• What products are currently in use today (describe what each is being used for and number of users) and which are being evaluated for the future?
• What is the timeframe for the portal project (or is determining the timeframe part of this project)?
• Is this project dependant on any other projects underway or being planned? Do other projects underway or being planned depend on this project?
• Is there a need to build Web 2.0-type end-user content creation and feedback loops into the portal?

Technology

• How are the portal products you’re currently using working? Are there problems?
• Portals pre-integrate with a collection of infrastructure services that are surfaced through the portal UI.  These services include security/identity (authentication and authorization via single sign-on and directory), content management (document management and web content management at a minimum), search, business process management and workflow, and application server and development environment (J2EE server or .NET). What do you currently use for these infrastructure services and are they expected to change? 
• What is the political context that drives usage of the portal products (particularly with regard to overlapping capabilities of multiple incumbent products) and may affect attempts to change the mix? Are there certain products that must automatically be on the shortlist or are not allowed on the shortlist?
• What is the mix of development skills (Java, .NET) available for the portal effort?
• Of the many features that portals can provide or integrate (e.g., collaborative workspaces, discussion groups, document libraries, workflow, access to enterprise applications, search, document management, end user web content creation), which are being used? Which are needed for the future?
• Personalization and context are a foundation of portals. What are the main categories of roles that the portal addresses? Will need to address? How is personalization utilized?
• Which enterprise applications will need to be surfaced through the portal?
• Are mobile or offline capabilities important for your user population?
• Where do you stand with service-oriented architecture?  Composite application development methods?

ZDNet writes today that Oracle is making a bid for BEA for the demonic price of $6.66 billion. Well, the devil is in the details and there are plenty of them to hash out if this deal ever flies. There is a large degree of overlap in the application server, development tool, collaboration, and portal spaces between BEA and Oracle. At least BEA doesn’t have a content management offering too, so Stellent is safe for now. I find it rather ironic that after writing in May about “How Many Portals Should a Vendor Offer?” that both Oracle and BEA have two sets of portal products on offer, now Oracle could have four (4!) portal products in its portfolio. I’d love to be a fly on the wall as they try to rationalize that one!

There have been rumors of Oracle (or others) buying BEA for quite a while, but it hasn’t happened yet. For example, in May of 2004, Java.net reported “Faced with a tough, if not losing, battle for PeopleSoft, Oracle executives said Thursday that they were considering other acquisitions… Henley (CFO, Chairman) said Oracle had been ‘looking at a variety of areas’ but didn’t identify any potential takeover targets. It has expressed interest in BEA as well as reserve over the price.” Of course BEA was trading at about $8.00 a share in mid-2004 versus $18.05 at the moment.

Time will tell if this deal shall come to pass. It is not for me to judge the will of Carl Icahn, who has reportedly been pushing for a sale for quite some time now. This simply shows that Oracle is continuing to seek growth through acquisition and that BEA has been undervalued, which should came as no revelation to anyone.

If you were planning to go to the Shared Insight (now IIR) conference on Portals, Collaboration & Content I have a discount code that I can give you to get a 15% discount.  You can use my code “SPKRM1991CR”. The conference is November 5-8, 2007 at the PGA National Resort and Spa in West Palm Beach, FL.  I don’t play golf (tennis anyone?) but it seems like a nice place.  And be sure to see my presentation “Picking the Right Collaboration Tools for the Job” while you’re there. To register go to www.iirusa.com/pcc .

I’m hoping that my recent postings on mashups (see here and here) have served to point out that 1) mashups are easier to define as an attitude and “feel” than a strict technological definition and 2) that mashups are not something new, although the attention to the quick&easy end of the composite application development scale is a good thing

I’d like to now add a #3 to that list: 3) that a killer web services API is sticky, contagious, and gets the creator/hoster a lot of good attention.

See this example from the EMC Documentum 6 enterprise content management platform. I had a few conversations with Documentum about the importance of web services APIs and what kinds of things and level of granularity they should operate at. Those conversations may have had a positive effect because Documentum subsequently released their first set of web services APIs, which I thought fit the mold of what customers were looking for. With version 6 they have pushed this further and added a development tool:

– Documentum Enterprise Content Services: a new, Web Services-based API that simplifies development and integration with ready-to-use enterprise content services for easy integration with other enterprise applications within a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). EMC’s new services interface was redesigned to eliminate Documentum specific methods and terminology and replace it with a vendor-neutral framework for working with content management functionality. These services enable developers with no Documentum experience to build ECM applications quickly and easily. This open, generic approach eliminates the “knowledge barriers” that get in the way of incorporating ECM functionality in all enterprise applications and business processes that deal with content

– Documentum Composer: provides a standardized environment for development and configuration tools that reduce the need for coding and facilitates composition of applications with reusable elements

I’m hoping that as vendors realize how powerful Google Maps has become in part because of the great API that has encouraged thousands of websites to create mashups that depend on it, they will also want to provide “mashable” APIs. “We want to be the Google Maps API of the xxx industry” is shorthand for saying that a vendor (or enterprise with B2B channels) wants to make available a mashable web service that is:

• Sticky: Once a website incorporates a web services API it is unlikely to remove it for quite a long time.
• Contagious: Every website incorporating the API acts as an ambassador to visitors that get ideas about how it could be used in their website. To quote an obnoxious 70’s shampoo commercial “And they’ll tell two friends, and so on, and so on, and so on …”
• Good attention: When the UI being integrated is branded or the source somehow easily recognizable, it acts as an advertisement for the infrastructure underneath.

I think I get this whole “mashup” thing, but there’s one part I’m still figuring out: why is a combo made with Google Maps considered a mashup?

To explain my confusion, I’ll start with some history. The term mashup is derived from the music world where it describes a song created by combining (generally overlaying) parts of other songs. I’d describe it as a “frankensong”. The term “mash” has implications of a forceful, less-than-orderly combination of things. If you check the dictionary, you’ll see definitions and synonyms for “mash” that include words like “violence”, “pounding”, “crush”, and (yikes!) “pulpy mass”. The implication is that the musical combination is supposed to be quirky, creative, and charmingly rough. The outcome should be “new” – a different vibe, emotion, genre. It should be an unintentional use of the pieces involved.

I can see how a messy Facebook page, with all sorts of seemingly disconnected content and media crammed next to each other to create a new and charming mosaic of someone’s life, would fit the mashup concept.

But take a look at everyone’s favorite web-based example of mashups: Google Maps. A client recently told me mashups should really be called “mapsups” because Google Maps seems to be the only example anyone can give! In fact, according to ProgrammableWeb, Google Maps accounts for 50% of all mashup API use. John Musser’s Mashup Feed shows 54% of examples leveraging Google Maps.

But are they mashups?

Google provides a mapping API that is used to provide geographic visualization. It’s not unintentional or hijacking something for an unintended use. It’s just an API. This is what it is for. It is no different than calling out to a charting API and, indeed, there have been visualization libraries for a long time for bar charts and geographic mapping (Microsoft MapPoint comes to mind). Maybe it seemed like a clever type of repurposing and combinatorial innovation to the first few people that saw mapsups, but they may have been uninformed about the code-calls-API underpinnings.

So, if the most common example of mashups doesn’t fit the narrative of the mashup and its origins, does that mean mapsups aren’t mashups? Or that the word has evolved and, if so, what does it mean now? I’ll mull that over a bit and publish my thoughts in another blog entry.