Innovation in the Programmable Web: Characterizing the Mashup Ecosystem

Abstract

This paper investigates the structure and dynamics of the Web 2.0 software ecosystem by analyzing empirical data on web service APIs and mashups. Using network analysis tools to visualize the growth of the ecosystem from December 2005 to 2007, we find that the APIs are organized into three tiers, and that mashups are often formed by combining APIs across tiers. Plotting the cumulative distribution of mashups to APIs reveals a power-law relationship, although the tail is short compared to previously reported distributions of book and movie sales. While this finding highlights the dominant role played by the most popular APIs in the mashup ecosystem, additional evidence reveals the importance of less popular APIs in weaving the ecosystem's rich network structure.

Quality-Aware Mashup Composition: Issues, Techniques and Tools

“…Indeed, publishing mashup components as APIs or services hides their internal details and gives more importance to external properties [12]. In line with this black-box view, in [4] we proposed a quality model for mashup components that privileges properties of the component APIs.…”

Diversity of the Mashup Ecosystem

“…The structure of the mashup ecosystem and its growth over time has been examined in (Yu and Woodard, 2008) and (Weiss and Sari, 2010). The authors of the first study (Yu and Woodard, 2008) characterize the mashup ecosystem as a three-tier structure: a central tier around the Google Maps API, an intermediate tier of the most popular APIs, and a peripheral tier of less popular APIs that are, nonetheless, important for the rich network structure of the ecosystem to emerge.…”

“…It is a sign of a healthy ecosystem that the number and diversity of APIs and mashups in the ecosystem increases continuously. The growth of the mashup ecosystem has been attributed to preferential attachment, whereby users select the APIs to include in a mashup by their popularity (Yu and Woodard, 2008). Furthermore, there is evidence that many mashups are created by copying or imitating existing mashups (Weiss and Sari, 2010).…”

The FAST Platform: An Open and Semantically-Enriched Platform for Designing Multi-channel and Enterprise-Class Gadgets

“…In particular, several research activities deal with the lightweight provision of IT-enabled components [15,16] as well as their composition on the resource layer [17,18]. Coming instead from a business perspective, researchers also started to analyse the underlying structure of the resulting open mashup ecosystem [19] and derived first managerial implications for API providers.…”