Google Mashups
In May, Google announced the Mashup Editor. It’s in closed beta state, but last night my account has been activated, so I had time to play with it.
You often read, that the Mashup Editor is the Google equivalent of Yahoo Pipes. That’s a misunderstanding. In fact, the tools are quite different.
Last things first: What comes out of a Google Mashup is a web application, not a feed. The web application can store user and/or application specific information, contain several web pages and use Javascript, HTML and CSS. It is clear, that these applications can be much more powerful than a remixed feed.
Screenshot Yahoo! Pipes
The downside of this power, of course, is the complexity of the interface. While in Yahoo Pipes, one can easily click and drag and drop and debug, things are much more complicated with the mashup editor. The basic principle is known from languages such as XSLT. In the editor, you write your web page and include certain tags that are then replaced by dynamic information from the application.
Screenshot Google Mashup Editor
The mashup editor provides — and that might be the actual innovation — powerful GUI elements to be used in the mashup: tabs, user input that is automatically aligned with elements in the data feed etc. Unfortunately, it is quite complex to use these elements: I eventually lost interest.
I guess that if I really would need the things I had in mind for the rockbüro-mashup, it would be faster coding them in PHP or Perl than using the Mashup Editor.
But fortunately, there are others. Here is a list of mashups that have been put together with the mashup editor. There is also a list of demo mashups provided by the Google-Team.
