To take the very straightforward Wikipedia’s definition, a Mashup is a “website or web application that combines content from more than one source“.
So, what’s the hype about mash-ups in travel 2.0; why there’s so much talk about this Frankestein-like approach to web-site building?
By mashing up very low-cost APIs (most famously Google Maps), and enpowering people to submit richer content in an extremely easy and exciting way, new mashup websites get born everyday, redefining the way users access to relevant informations.
The cost and complexity of mashing up exsisting Apis is dramatically lower that developing individual solutions and is bringing down the “entry-level” at which a professional travel website can be published.
Have a look here to the amazing numbers of travel mash-ups that are being created everyday. You will notice that most of the listed website rely on Google Maps, adding up other application”layers” onto the map locator. You will also probably think that most of those websites won’t make any economic sense in the long term, and will have a minimum reach.
So why should all this mash-up hype matter for your business?
First of all, these websites are redefining the ways users search and browse travel contents and are addressing experience expectations that are not so well answered to by traditionally (hyerarchically) organized websites: tag-based and map-based navigation is becoming an extremely common and user-friendly way to access complex and extensive content. See for istance the famous Flickr “Tag Cloud” or the newly launched Travelistic, which uses tags and maps to index the travel video content.
An up-to-date, multimedia, interactive, consumer-oriented, specific and easy-to-browse content is more than most travel“corporate” or “traditional” websites can usually offer and can be now assebled with a “Ikea-like” API’s kit, and some user-generated content on the top.
Moreover, these websites are extremely apt to address the so-called long-tail: thanks to very low implementation costs, people who have a genuine interest in a given topic can publish and mantain interesting websites, often resulting in providing highly relevant infos to the users and to the search engines.