Google’s New Mashup Editor

location based services

Posted on June 1, 2007
Filed Under web 2.0 |

With Google’s MyMaps mashup tool we saw that Google wasn’t going to be content to just focus on APIs for developers. While most of the commentary focused on the location-based services aspect of this, there was something else telling about the tool, namely that Google sees integration of services at the end point to be a powerful set of capabilities that help them overcome the structural advantage that Microsoft has with regard to desktop applications. Google Gears was the second cog, quite literally.

Google’s new Mashup Editor raises the table stakes because now Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft have all made clear their intention to enable application creation from RSS/Atom feed sources.

Mashups created with the Google Mashup editor can be published to a hosted environment. You choose your subdomain and we’ll host your feed-based mashups at googlemashups.com. You can go from creation, to testing to publishing in one click of a button.

I haven’t written much about what I anticipate the impact behind the enterprise firewall to be with these tools, but it does seem very reasonable to suggest that as more enterprise applications embrace feeds we will see these tools rise in prominence as a consequence.

Structured data, exposed as feeds, creates many new opportunities for low cost application development. With upwards of 20 million experienced script developers in the world, there will clearly be a ready supply of professionals capable of working with these new environments.

Tags: Google, Gears, MyMaps, Mashups

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