At last week's Mashup Ecosystem Summit held in San Francisco and sponsored by IBM with an invited assemblage of leading players in this space, I gave an opening talk about the current challenges and opportunities of mashups.  And there I posed the title of this post as a statement instead of a question.   The reason that it's a question here is entirely driven by the context of who is currently creating the majority of mashups these days.  Because even a cursory examination of what people are doing every day on the Web right now tells us that mashups — also known as ad hoc Web sites created on the fly out of other Web sites — are indeed happening in a large way, albeit in simple forms, by the tens of thousands online every day. 

The consumerization of the enterprise as younger workers bring their Web 2.0 skills and habits to work has already begun.But inside our organizations, both in the IT department and in business units, mashups are a much rarer phenomenon.  And in fact, this is one of the classic hallmarks of the Web 2.0 era; the much larger community of the Web as a major source of innovation and leading edge behavior that subsequently moves across the firewall and into our workplaces.

However, the topic of this blog is aimed at the application of Web 2.0 to the enterprise and so whether mashups will be a significant new model for application development inside our businesses anytime soon is still somewhat of an open question.  It's worth noting that McKinsey's recent global executive survey of Web 2.0 in business said that a whopping 21% of large businesses across the board are planning investment in mashups in 2007, but a sobering 54% of business executives also said mashups were not even under consideration.  Understanding the timing on mashup adoption therefore is important along with the challenge of communicating their potential.

Since the mashup story is primarily being driven by spontaneous activity at the edge of the Internet, an accurate and updated picture of what's actually happening with them is harder to make out than if it was being driven by a centralized industry effort.  And as it turns out, this makes what's happening richer and more exciting than it would be otherwise while at the same providing significant challenges for those that want to take these compelling ideas and apply them deliberately to solve business problems.

So in the interest of making sure we have the broadest industry discussion we can about mashups — and to make sure there is some kind of snapshot of what we think we're seeing in this space — I thought I'd summarize the notes from my talk at the Mashup Ecosystem Summit.

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