[Yahoo Pipes] From Music to Culture to Web 2.0 Tall buildings in major cities are often covered with advertisements selling products from bubble gum to cell phone services, or promoting the latest blockbuster film. The building turns into a giant billboard: advertising is mashed up with architecture. A more specific example; cigarette companies in Santiago de Chile have been pushed to include on their cigarette packs images and statements of people who have cancer due to smoking: two cultural codes that in the past were separated on purpose are mashed up as a political compromise to try to keep people from smoking, while accommodating their desires. The Hulk and Spiderman have been smashed up to become the Spider-Hulk. In this case, the hybrid character has the shape of the Hulk with Spiderman's costume on top. It is neither but both—simultaneously.16 Mashups are everywhere. They have moved beyond music to other areas of culture. Such move is dependent on running signifiers relying on the spectacular repetition of media. And repetition had meddled with computer culture since the middle of the twentieth century. The strategic combination of mashups was at play in new media during the eighties with the conceptualization of the personal computer. The computer's "desktop" which was designed for Apple's GUI (Graphic User Interface) is in essence a technological and conceptual mashup; in this case the computer's information, which usually was accessed via the notorious command line was made accessible to the average user when it became smashed up with a visual interface called a "desktop" making an obvious reference to a person's real life desktop. This allowed the computer user to concentrate on using the machine for personal goals, while not worrying about how the different parts of the computer ran. This conceptual model has been extended to web application mashups. Web Application Mashups Mashups as a conceptual model, however, take on a different role in software. For example, the purpose of a typical Web 2.0 mashup is not to allegorize particular applications, but rather, by selectively sampling in dynamic fashion, to subvert applications to perform something they could not do otherwise by themselves. Such mashups are developed with an interest to extend the functionality of software for specific purposes. The actual code of the applications is left intact, which means that mashups are usually combinations of preexisting applications that are brought together with some type of "binding" technology. In a way, the pre-existing application is almost like Lego's: ready for modular construction. The complexity with web applications mashups lies in how intricate the connections become. The most rough of mashups are called "scrapings" because they sample material from the front pages of different online resources and websites, and the more complex mashups actually include material directly taken from databases, that is if the online entity decides to open an Application Programming Interface (API) to make their information available to web developers.17 In either case web application mashups, for the most part, leave the actual code intact, and rely on either dynamic or static sampling, meaning that they either take data from a source once (static) or check for updates periodically (dynamic). Web application mashups are considered forms that are not primarily defined by particular software; they are more like models conceived to fill a need, which is then met by binding different technology. The most obvious example is Ajax which has been defined by Duanne Merrill as "a web application model rather than a specific technology."18 Ajax tentatively stands for "Asynchronous Javascript + XML." When considering the history of the technology used in the Ajax model, it becomes clear that the technology being used to develop web 2.0 content has been around for a while: Javascript and XML have been part of the web for many years. So the development of web 2.0 lies in part in a cultural sophistication of certain technology. Some well-known mashups include mapping mashups, which are created with readymade interfaces like Google Earth or Yahoo's maps, offering the combination of city streets with information of specific businesses or other public information that might be of interest to the person who developed the mashup.19 A mashup model that appears to be stable as long as the websites offering the information keep their APIs open is Pipes by Yahoo!.20 This particular type of mashup, unlike reblogs, goes deeper into the database to access dynamic data. Pipes by Yahoo! actually points to the future of the web, where the user will be able to customize, to an extremely sophisticated level, the type of information that s/he will be accessing from day to day. Pipes, in theory, provides the user with the same possibilities made available by Google, when the user is able to customize his/her own personal portal news page. The difference in Pipes, however, is that the user can combine very specific sources for very specific reasons. In a way, the specificity demands that the user really think about why certain sources should be linked. Pipes basically allows the user to choose a particular source, such as news, biddings, or map information to then link it to another source. Many of the pipes that I have browsed through leave me with a sense of critical thinking and practicality by the persons who created them. Not that Pipe developers are after social or cultural commentary, but rather that they develop most pipes to be useful in specific ways. When the user is initiated in Pipes, some of the examples provided include: "apartment near something," "aggregated news alert," and EBay "Price Watch." All these pipes propose a very specific functionality; that is to find an apartment, to get the latest news, or to keep up with the best prices on particular biddings on EBay. For example, a user could be looking for an apartment in a particular area. Then the person could connect a public directory, such as Craig's list, which has rental information, to Yahoo maps; the Pipe would then be updated as the information is updated in the particular sources, meaning the map or the rental resource. What these examples show is that web application mashups function differently from music mashups. Music mashups are developed for entertainment; they are supposed to be consumed for pleasure, while web application mashups, like Pipes by Yahoo!, actually are validated if they have a practical purpose. This means that the concept and cultural role of mashups change drastically when they move from the music realm to a more open media space such as the Web. We must now examine this crucial difference. |
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