NY Times Does the Mash

John Musser, September 3rd, 2007

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You know mashup tools are going more mainstream when the Sunday New York Times reports on them. In Do the Mash (Even if You Don’t Know All the Steps) reporter Anne Eisenberg takes a look at how the latest generation of mashup tools are aiming to let non-programmers create useful applications with little or no code. Covered in the story are IBM’s QEDWiki, Yahoo Pipes, and Microsoft Popfly.

Devising that sort of mash-up, which handles multiple data sources to produce a customized solution, is typically the province of a professional. But the new systems are designed, their creators say, so people with modest technical skills can tailor applications to their needs — while writing little or no code.

For now, the technology is free, as its creators race to sign up customers, extend their franchises and perhaps someday dominate the field. Some of the new systems are aimed at businesses, others at consumers who want to entertain themselves by creating games or ornamenting a blog.

This is a fast moving market: in the past two years we’ve had almost 30 mashup-tool related stories here including coverage of Pipes news, Popfly news, QEDWiki news, as well as what a highly competitive market this is.

The Times piece has a screenshot from this video on QEDWiki from IBM’s David Barnes which includes a segment where he pulls data from ProgrammableWeb: