I asked Scoble for his thoughts on my post about the term mashup, and he decided simply to link to it. While I appreciate the traffic, I’d appreciate opinions even more. Luckily, in the same post he linked to Sam Ramji writing about what he called “enterprise mashups“. Again, love the idea but hate the name mashup.

According to Sam, Scoble said:

[W]hat’s to prevent mash-ups from being the main way that departmental apps are built in most enterprises 3-4 years from now?

Again, it depends on the definition of the term “mashup”. Are we’re talking about browser component based apps that leverage what Scoble calls ICC’s? If so, Scoble is only wrong about the timeframe. My team has a browser based application leveraging Virtual Earth running on our intranet server right now.

Quick terminology sidebar: I use the term browser based application to refer to these AJAX and mashup style apps, since they download code and run in the browser itself. By comparison, I use the term web based application for the more traditional browser apps that did all the processing on the server and used the browser essentially as a dumb terminal.

While I think these browser based applications will go mainstream in the enterprise soon, there are a couple of things holding up adoption: availability of tools and of the components themselves.

On the tools side, the AJAX programming model is just too difficult for most programmers. Rudimentary debugging support, late bound script languages, no compiler to help you find errors. Sounds like web development circa 1997, doesn’t it? I’m hoping Atlas will be to AJAX what ASP.NET was to ASP.

As for existing components, most of the ones Scoble calls out have little relevance to the enterprise. There’s little point to a Feedmap or a Flickr bar in my enterprise app. And I’m not sure I even want to go into the implications of serving up ads in an enterprise app. That pretty much leaves mapping components like VE and Google Maps as the only browser components of interest to the enterprise developer. So far anyway.

I wonder if Scoble knows of any other enterprise relevant browser components out there?

Wikipedia has two definitions of mashup:

• Mashup (music): a musical genre consisting of the combination of the parts of more than one song
• Mashup (web application hybrid): a website or web application that combines content from more than one source

I was originally introduced to the term mashup in the musical sense by Daily Source Code. In this usage, mashup implies mixing songs together. Given that songs are typically stand along entities designed to be enjoyed as is, mashup means (to me anyway) combining stuff that was never meant to be combined in the first place. Even Wikipedia includes musical mashup under the general heading of Bastard Pop.

So given that, by definition, mashups combine stuff that wasn’t designed to be combined, I don’t understand why an application like Zvents or Virtual Places is considered a mashup. Apps like these use browser based components (Scoble calls them Internet Connected Components) that are well defined, have public APIs and are designed to be used together. Not exactly “bastard pop” now is it?

In reality, a site like Zvents could have used a server side mapping component and provided a similar experience. Of course, a client side mapping solution is both sexier and more practical (no need for dedicated map data files or assemblies on your own machines) but semantically they provide the same information. Same thing goes for Virtual Places, except that Virtual Places is also pulling both functionality (i.e. the mapping component) as well as data (i.e. blogs and photos) from other sites across the Internet. Could that be done on the server side? You betcha. Would it be as cool or functional? No. Does that make it a completely different type of application that deserves a new name. IMO, no. These are component based apps – they just use the browser as the platform and the components are coming across the web (as you would expect when you use the browser as a platform).

The higher order bit for me is who controls the experience. For apps like Zvents and VirtualPlaces, it’s the application developer. For something like Live.com, it’s me. I decide what to put on my Live page. Not that one is more important than the other or that they aren’t compatible experiences – I could easily imagine a Zvents gadget that lived in Live.com. Or consuming the RSS feed from Zvents in Live.com. Or a generic iCal gadget that could consume a Zvents iCal feed. But the point is that there are large differences between browser component based application like Zvents and a user managed composite browser application like Live.com.

To me, composite apps like Live.com fit better to the original definition of mashup than something like Zvents or Virtual Places. They both have their place and their value, but I like to call things that are different by different names in order to reduce confusion.

Of course, composite apps aren’t limited to the browser. p&p just shipped their Composite UI Application Block last week. I dug into it a bit last week and it’s awesome. More on that later.