Greater than the sum of the parts

IDEA No 81

MASHUP

The Marauder’s Map plots every inch of Hogwarts and pinpoints every person in the school, even the ghosts. In the same way as The Daily Prophet foresaw the iPad, the Marauder’s Map is a magical realization of the mashup.

A mashup is a Web-based application that uses two or more sources to create a new, hybrid service. One of the first mashups was developed at the University of Edinburgh in 1994. The World Wide Earthquake Locator used data from the National Earthquake Center and displayed it on the Xerox PARC Map Viewer. The result was a map that plotted up-to-date earthquake information within hours of it happening.

But mashups really took off in 2005. Enterprising hackers created housingmaps.com, ...

Get 100 Ideas that Changed the Web now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.