What's the killer app for mashups?

Last week at Forrester's IT Forum one of the analysts suggested that spreadsheets would become the killer app for mashups. They certainly are as good a candidate as any other but it's worth considering the alternatives. Between spreadsheets, portals, SOA, and even interactive 'widgets', there's are a lot of contenders for the title of mashup killer-app.

So what's the killer app for mashups? What makes them into the 'must have' solution for IT and business users alike? We try not to be too self-serving in this blog, living by the 'fact not spin' mantra. And I must admit that the question feels very introspective, perhaps being truly meaningful only to those of us who eat and breathe mashups every day. But perhaps the killer-app discussion has a side-benefit: it is a good recap of the many diverse applications of mashups across the enterprise.

Is the killer app for mashups a tried-and-true business utility like Excel? JackBe certainly sees the synergy between mashups and a familiar, user-centric interface like Excel. Mashups-in-Excel can let users consume existing mashups and publish spreadsheets as services into the mashup cloud. This could make mashups very popular with communities of users that would otherwise never benefit from mashups. But spreadsheets will never be a 'one stop shop' for mashups. You'll always have a mashup creation tool for advanced users to do advanced mashup wiring. Is mashup consumption enough to make it the killer app?

Is the killer app a Web 2.0 technology like widgets? JackBe has seen the value of the fusion of widgets with mashups; these dynamic 'mashlets' make mashup-based information very sharable and collaborative. As Andrew McAfee, the Web 2.0 guru and all-around big thinker at Harvard, recently put it:

...it is striking how few opportunities people have to generate, modify, and share information freely and widely on the Intranet, especially when compared with their abilities to do the same on the Internet. Since so many organizations describe people as their most important assets, it is puzzling why these opportunities are so constrained.

Mashlets do just that. One of JackBe's customers has deployed mashup-driven widgets into their collaborative community. They are letting users embed auto-generated mashlets into their own websites, each of which gives a soundbite of their community information and points visitors back to community. In general, widgets show great potential for mashup-sharing. But is mashlet-driven community-building the killer app for mashups?

Is the killer app a tried-and-true business utility like the enterprise portal? Every organization has a portal (I heard one company admit to having 150+) and they are a decidely 'last generation' technology. Delivering mashups via a simple JSR-168 wrapper can let portal users and administrators to quickly deploy a very dynamic Web 2.0 technology into this undynamic-but-ubiquitous web interface. Like widgets, this mashup application makes mashups very consumable. But who's doing the mashup creation to fill this demand?

Is the killer app an IT-facing technology like SOA? We've written many times about the genuine synergy between mashups and SOA. Mashups give a user-embraceable 'face' to this otherwise IT-only technology; mashups in turn benefit from an ever-growing cloud of SOA services that can be mashed. Of course, the association between mashups and SOA seems to hold a bit of controversy, but the real question is bigger. Can SOA alone make mashups into the next big thing?

Only time will tell which of these combinations will ultimately become the killer app for mashups. Perhaps the true killer app for mashups still lies undiscovered by the industry intelligencia. Or perhaps the killer-app for mashups is not any one of these things but a combination of them all. Afterall, every organization has its unique needs, wants, and goals. Perhaps it will vary by department, by industry, or by maturity of the organization.

Regardless, any organization that is planning for mashups should consider all of these uses for mashups when doing its mashup roadmap.