Mashups on a plane

I am writing this as I fly home from the Enterprise 2.0 Conference. It was a good show to get the big picture of all the things under the Enterprise 2.0 umbrella and all the heavyweights were there (IBM, Cisco, Microsoft, ) talking Web 2.0 everything in the Enterprise: wiki, blog, search, mashups, collaboration, and a few other topics as well.

It probably wouldn’t surprise anyone to hear that my favorite session was the ‘Enterprise 2.0 Mash-up’ panel. JackBe wasn’t on the panel (but of course we would have been happy to!) so I got the chance to listen closely to other vendors talk Enterprise Mashups. Here’s a few of the more interesting things I got to hear in the session:

• BEA showed off AquaLogic Pages. They created a blog, grabbed a SOAP data source, connected that to a Google map and then tried to grab a YouTube video to include in their mashup. Truthfully, it felt more like a user-driven portal builder. But I must admit it was still cool to see.
• Share Methods talked a bit about ‘office app’ mashups and a new mashup ‘standard’, OpenSAM (http://www.opensam.org), that includes things like WebDAV, ALE (Ajax Linking and Embedding), CGI, SSL, and a few other technical bits. The goal, an admittedly noble one, is to allow online apps vendors to interoperate and, optimally, be used together in a single cohesive environment. Not surprisingly, Share Method’s ‘product’ (does such a word apply to a mashed solution?), ShareOffice, seemed to include lots of other third-party apps within it.
• Rod Smith, IBM's VP of Emerging Internet Technologies, showed off QED with some of the neat weather info from Accuweather you might have heard about before. He was refreshingly candid about the time it took to build the demo (17 hours, including 4 hours of design time). And, unlike most of the vendors on the panel (or mashup vendors in general), put some emphasis on ‘getting mashup data from a SQL statement’. Good to know that at least IBM understands where most enterprise data originates.
• Near-Time talked about ‘cross-organizational’ collaboration, not something I often hear associated with the user-driven mashup revolution. But they did seem to have experiences in data-driven mashups.

I must admit I am surprised how different JackBe’s data-driven mashups are from the wiki-, RSS- and application-driven ‘mashups’ of other mashup vendors. The lesson, I guess, is a simple one: like ‘Enterprise 2.0’, the phrase ‘Enterprise Mashup’ is broadly used today. Caveat emptor.

There was also an interesting side-conversation about the ‘definition of a widget’ and what it would take to allow vendors to pass widgets around between themselves. This is a topic raised at the recent IBM Mashup Summit and while it ain’t a done deal yet its good to hear the mashup vendors at least talking about it.

And, in spite of the differences in the practice of the mashup vendors, the principles seemed to be all in line: simplicity, quick, and richly interactive. Now that’s something JackBe can agree on.