RSSWhither the mashup?
A year ago, I was all about the mashups… an awesome, user-friendly, IT-controlled way to plunder the corporate data mine, safely and easily for the benefit of all involved. A lot of companies were coming out with easy-to-use mashup builder software supporting any number of backend database standards and advances in interfaces were both cool and intuitive. If information is the key to commerce, then surely the mashup was destined to be a Web 2.0 winner in the corporate world.
Today, I'm skimming McKinsey's 3 year retrospective Web 2.0 in Business survey, and it's clear I made a mistake. Mashup adoption under the "key tool" metric has barely doubled from 3% to an anemic 8%; blogs, podcasts, and even social networking all approach or breach the 50% mark. Blogs! Who would have guessed?
I suppose the key thing to read from what was adopted and what was not was that the age old rule that the familiar will win while the unusual loses is still in full effect. Blogs, podcasts, wikis… even social networking platforms all play on familiar paradigms of information exchange for most users. Mashups, while powerful, have a foreign flair to them for anyone who hasn't spent some time building relational databases. Even with the intuitive user interfaces, the concepts behind the interface can prove confusing.
McKinsey presents no data on the why behind any of the findings, so that's all just inference, of course. And Web 2.0 is clearly doing well as a whole based on their results; penetration is broad and satisfaction levels are, well, satisfactory. But it may be a few years more (or another generation) before mashups get the love I think they deserve in the enterprise.
