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Mashups are indeed becoming an integral part of business operations that are involved in the online space, especially social media. Although the use of mashups first started out as somewhat of a novelty, essential operations that improve efficiency and connections to large groups of people are being completed via the use of Mashups.

Mashups are taking the possibilities of functionality to a whole new level. The combining of applications and the customization and determination of specific functionalities is driving the evolution of the web. Michael Ogrinz is no stranger to web applications and applications that increase efficiency of marketing and business processes. As a note, he is the mind behind Localendar.com, which is used by a tremendous number of businesses, churches, and non-profit organizations.

Ogrinz has been spending a fair amount of time in the mashups arena lately. He has a new book coming out in March called Mashup Patterns: Designs and Strategies for using Mashups in Enterprise Environments. And as any authority would tell you, social network participation is a key factor for connecting with niche audiences. Check out the Mashup Patterns social network.

In a recent blog post, Ogrinz mentioned that he is going to be providing some tutorials at programmableweb.com. Ogrinz also recently did an interview with ProgrammableWeb’s founder John Musser about the new Mashup Patterns book. I thought it was interesting that he noted that he is going to try to stick to free and open-source software to building the mashups. These could all come in handy for anyone building mashups.

As a bit more background of Mashup Patterns, “the core of the book is organized into a set of 34 patterns grouped into five main categories. This structure is intended to organize the patterns according the circumstances where they add the most value.”

In his post, Ogrinz mentions 8 Tools for Mashup Development. The online tools that he mentions are:

Public Sites

• Yahoo Pipes
• Google
• Dapper

Sandboxed Commercial Environments

• OpenKapow
• JackBe’s MDC

Free / Open-Source Tools

• Mooshup/WSO2
• Ubiquity
• Chickenfoot

The decision to use a certain tool should not infer priority over another, but Ogrinz said, “Like many developers, I am naturally lazy; so if I use a particular product for a certain pattern, you might correctly infer that I choose what (I thought) the best tool for the job was. But there are many other factors that go into the due-diligence process for choosing an enterprise tool that you should consider – and that’s a great topic for a future post.”

If you want to become more familiar with the world of mashups, Mashup Patterns may be a good place to look for information. Although it doesn’t publish until March 2009, a Rouch Cuts version of the book is currently available which has all the content that is available up to this point.

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