Mashups and CoP2.0
It strikes me that looking at this new development of mashups from the point of view of trying to find out how you might choose one of them to benefit a particular community, or to facilitate our own learning, could be slightly missing the point.
It’s not as if there is an option to decide that mashups probably aren’t of interest to you, so you can mostly ignore them and they will go away.
Because this thing is already happening and it’s changing the way the people we all deal with are going to use their computers.
Fundamentally, I think it represents a final and irreversible shift away from the architecture of desktop/laptop computers and onto the internet itself. By providing open APIs, the big database owners – Google, Yahoo, Amazon etc have set up an ecosystem whereby the next generation of applications development centres around them rather than around Microsoft, Apple or Linux.
How will this shift in the big picture affect us?
That’s a topic worth exploring, in my opinion and I’d like to venture a few suggestions to get started.
1) Some new members will approach the existing communities having already had experience with rich, dynamic and compelling interfaces. If they are expected to fit in with an existing setup which looks dull and obsolete to them, they might just laugh out loud and then build their own cop2.0 instead.
2) The commoditisation of non-proprietary entry level computers will drive down the cost so that much of the rest of the world will be able to be connected.
3) It will matter even less which computer you happen to be sitting at today. Digital identity and synchronisation of workflows will be rolled out to everyone so that they bring all their own stuff with them when they join in.
4) Community links and ties will be more explicit, perhaps even to the extent that automated systems will be able to depict the existence of potential CoPs just waiting to be crystallised out.
5) Overall, perhaps there will be a tendency for CoPs2.0 to be more easily created and then dissipated again, with less clear boundaries and more rapidly shifting internal and external dynamics.
If none of this makes any sense at all then try reading “Mashup ecosystem poised to explode” at zdnet
“With mashups, much the same way blogging systems put Web publishing into the hands of millions of ordinary non-technical people, the barrier to developing applications and turning creativity into innovation is so low that there’s a vacuum into which an entire new class of developers will be sucked. It’s already happening. “
