April 2006
Mash-ups: Business Models and Trends
Paul Rademacher talked about how Housing Maps, which is a mash-up of Google Maps and craigslist, came out of a real world need for him and grew from that. The lesson here is that usefulness is a key driver for success in the Web mash-ups world. He also mentioned that Housing Maps isn't necessarily a pure API mash-up, because the craigslist data is taken from their RSS feeds and then he stores the content on his own server. So mash-ups are still painful to implement, despite all the hype around using APIs to deliver them. Paul also said he that reached 900,000 visitors to Housing Maps without any marketing effort, which is an indication of how mash-ups can be low-cost to both produce and market.
November 2005
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