Mashups are hot!  Everyone agrees that this type of Web 2.0 application will be the thing that seperates the men from the boys on the web in the next few years.  For those of you not in the "know," a mashup, according to wikipedia is a website or Web 2.0 application that uses content from more than one source to create a completely new service.   Wanna learn why you need a mashup on your site to drive volume sustainable traffic?  Read on!

So what makes our myRealtyBlog a mashup?  By combining MLS, the Zillow™ API and Yahoo!® Maps and Neighborhood into a blog, we created an entirely new service for Realtors®.  Voila! Mashup!  myRealtyBlog is so hot and cool, that one of the leading mashup sites, mashups.com featured our technology as the Mashup of the day! 

What a mashup can do for a Realtor® website
A mashup, while cool might not immediately make sense for a real estate website.  However, when you begin to think of it as a tool to get prospects to visit your website, other real estate related site to link to you and a way to keep people interested in your site, it starts to make a lot more sense.   The fact is, most Realtors can't afford to pay a top web developer to design a useful mashup that they can use as link bait.  So, that's why we put together the coolest one in the industry today for you and plopped it right into the myRealtyBlog platform.  Our mashup is not only cool looking and interactive, it helps people looking in your area to find attractions, coffee shops, schools, transportation and other places of interest around the house they are looking at.  It also helps them to understand their new neighborhood better by integrating census data with Yahoo!® Mapping capabilities.  Yahoo!® Neighborhood also allows them to research school system, crime index and income status for each of your listings.  Now the coolest part of the mashup is the Zillow™ API integration.  Zillow™ allows your visitors to view Zestimates for each listing and comparable homes so they understand the market better.

So, in terms of ROI, what can a mashup do for your website? 
A local Realty Team just went live with our mashup last week on a brand new domain (that means technically, they shouldn't see much traffic).  In one week, Best Cape Coral Realty, saw over 5,000 additional hits to their website per day and more than 200 unique visitors each day.  Since sites mature over time, we expect these numbers to increase substantially over the next few months.

What Wikipedia has to say about mashups
According to Wikipedia, a mashup is a website or Web 2.0 application that uses content from more than one source to create a completely new service. This is akin to transclusion.  Content used in mashups is typically sourced from a third party via a public interface or API. Other methods of sourcing content for mashups include Web feeds (e.g. RSS or Atom) and JavaScript.

Much the way blogs revolutionised online publishing, mashups are revolutionizing web development by allowing anyone to combine existing data from sources like Amazon.com, eBay, Google, Strikeiron, Windows Live and Yahoo! in innovative ways. The greater availability of simple and lightweight APIs has made mashups relatively easy to design. They require minimal technical knowledge and thus custom mashups are sometimes created by unlikely innovators, combining available public data in new and creative ways. While there are many useful mashups, others are simple novelties or gimmicks, with minimal practical utility.

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