Mashups are the way of the future. To be honest I didn’t quite believe that statement until I got my hands on WordPress and started building this blog. WordPress is an awesomely good software product that demonstrates a few important points, including:

1. It’s necessary (or at least a good thing) for some products to be Open Source.
2. Free software can be as good as expensive software.

Very powerful enhancements can be delivered through plug-ins.

Now, technically speaking, a plug-in is not a mashup. Mashups are not purpose-built for plugging into one environment, they are programs which thread services (other programs) together and are available to be plugged into many environments. Nevertheless, plugins and mashups are close cousins. With WordPress plugins you do not do any coding at all, and you just install them by downloading them, uploading them by ftp to your blog site and then activating them with a single mouse-click. It’s impressive.

What really stunned me though, was adding Google Ads to this blog site. True, it involved a little coding – I had to copy 7 lines of code into a php file – but that was it. I then watched as, within about an hour, Google started to put ads on my site that matched the text in some way. I found it dramatic, because I could suddenly envisage being linked thousands of Google servers working on my behalf – all because I injected 7 lines of code into one file.

Working with plugins quickly shows you how powerful mashups will be, once they are simple enough for Joe Soap and his kid sister to use. That will surely happen, courtesy of web services. But exactly how?

Some commentators have suggested that all mashups will be free, and I’m sure most of them will be free. However, the commercial situation is not that simple. Some mashups deliver significant value that users will be willing to pay for.

The StrikeIron Dynamic

StrikeIron, may have the answer, or to be precise, one of the answers. The mash-ups market is not going to be a pure market. Some mashups will be born great, some achieve greatness and some have greatness thrust upon them. But most will be ignored, or only used by Gordon the Geek and his mother.

There will be commercial mash-ups, extranet mashups, gaming mashups, social mashups (for MySpace, Facebook, Hi5, etc.), virtual world mashups and so on. There will be web hubs that consist of collections of mashups, and these will make the market – for the mashups they represent.

StrikeIron stole a march on the rest of the software industry when it conceived of the Web Services Management Platform that it now deploys. The company realized that many services, particularly information services such as those offered by Dunn & Bradstreet, Lexus Nexus, Hoovers, etc. would eventually be made available through mash-ups on a commercial basis (such companies just don’t publish their information under a creative commons license.)

So they built a platform that could present such information services as mashups and went around signing up information providers with the offer to help these companies build mashups (if they thought they needed help). The current list of StrikeIron customers includes; the US Census Bureau, D&B, The US Postal Service, NASDAQ, Yellow Pages and others.

So what does the Web Services Management Platform do? More than anything else it makes using mashups simple and it also makes it easy to pay for services presented through mashups. As a brief summary of functions, the platform does the following:

• It meters, logs and tracks usage of all mashups and associated services
• It manages sign-up and billing for usage.
• It carries out user authentication to prevent user fraud.
• It is built to be secure.
• It handles exceptions
• It manages (translates/reconciles) protocols.

In other words, it does all the technical things that any company would have to do in order to offer, manage and commercialize mashups.

If it is not clear to you how such mashups will be used, set yourself a Google homepage up and add some of the many available widgets to it. Well, the StrikeIron mashups could be plugged into a web page of any kind anywhere in the same way. The only difference is that there will be a commercial arrangement that covers usage.

Imho, StrikeIron has the right idea here. It may well have defined the way the commercial mashup market will work.