Every couple of months we see a breathless report about how ‘bad guys’ make use of the same tools as the rest of us — cell phones, email, facebook, twitter, and so on and so on. Its a pretty basic, if not eternal story. Technology designed for good, gains a following, used for evil.

Well we can officially add mashups to the list. Yesterday I ran across a new mashup (hat tip: http://sf.curbed.com) that efficiently informs would be vandals and muggers where donors to the Proposition 8 campaign — outlawing same-sex marriage in California — live and work. Like all mashups it does its intended job very nicely. With just a couple of quick mouse clicks I could find out who in my neighborhood donated  and where exactly I could jump them (see below).

Now, don’t get me wrong, the creator of this mashup is clearly not doing anything illegal. All the information used is publicly available. But we have to ask: What is the purpose of this mashup? It can’t be for good, that’s for sure.

The bigger issue however is what we as a society do about it. All the rules set down deciding what the public should and should not have access to were established long before mashups, and even the Web as we know it today were around. Would the sponsors of the donation disclosure legislation — designed to clean up government with transparency — have been quite so forthcoming if they knew this would be the result? My gut says no. But to what end? Should any potentially incendiary information be kept from the public because the simple but effective  barrier of having  to get off your couch, go down to city hall during business hours, and request it is now obliterated?

Could it be that mashups are going to quickly become one of the major challenges to a free and open democracy? If you had asked me yesterday I would have said you were crazy. But once the properties listed here — or in the similar mashups sure to come for future debates — are vandalized there will be two effects: An outcry to restrict access to this information and a chilling of political donations and activity (or at the very least a strong incentive to take it all back behind the curtain). In either case our society will be poorer as a consequence.

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I’ve spent a lot of time this past year thinking and talking about mashups. As Dion Hinchcliffe pointed out after the Web 2.0 Expo earlier this year the market has really begun to mature. Of all the Web 2.0 tools and approaches, mashups are the most complex and as a consequence one of the more interesting from a strategy standpoint. In my May report, The Mashup Opportunity: How To Make Money In The Evolving Mashup Ecosystem, I discussed the three major mashup types: presentation, data, and logic. (A brief aside: its amazing how out of date the below graphic looks already, a mere 7 months later.)

When looking at the market opportunities my focus has been mostly on the later two types of mashups. This is where the mashup platform vendors — JackBe, IBM, Serena Software and newcomer Corizon — all play and, ultimately, where the most money will be made. It would be going to far to say I have ignored presentation layer mashups outright, but in all honesty the market there is not nearly as dynamic as in the other two categories and is in many ways indistinguishable from basic portals. The focus is on bringing content near other content, not data transformation or insight which we see in the most complex mashups.

That said, I was reminded this past week of exactly how much room there is to run in the presentation layer mashup and widget space by, of all things, ESPN. I was reading a game recap of the Michigan upset of Duke in Men’s college basketball and came across the simple game recap data presentation at right.

In one simple graphic I saw all I needed to see: it was a close game; there were lots of lead changes; Michigan pulled away with about 7 minutes to go in the second half and never gave the lead back. In other words, there was a ton of information wrapped up in one simple presentation.

Now, lets compare the Michigan/Duke game to another on the same night, Vermont at Pitt. Same chart, new data and we see a very different game. Here we can see that Pitt went on a quick run to start the game and never looked back, shellacking Vermont by nearly 30 points.

These simple graphics — widgets or presentation mashups if you like — provided a ton of information in a very neat package, saving me the trouble of reading the specifics for anything more than details.

In a business context this style of data and content presentation can be tremendously valuable, despite the relative simplicity of the application. Think of this same graphic with sales data versus plan, feature burn down rate, or project milestones over time. This information is available today, of course, however the presentation of that data is not nearly as elegant or accessible. Business intelligence software — which this application most closely resembles — is not yet focused on these simple, business-friendly applications, and thus far no mashup or widget vendors have focused on this type of solution for the enterprise.

It seems to me there there is a market gap here: basic presentation mashups and widgets for the lines of business, surfacing these types of simple data presentations on desktops, intranet pages, and in SharePoint. I would be shocked if Clearspring or Widgetbox couldn’t easily do this today, but neither company seems to focus much attention on the enterprise. And the mashup vendors like JackBe, IBM, and Serena seem much more focused on the lower volume, higher margin business of data and process mashups. Even Lotus Mashups, the business friendly mashup environment from IBM feels a bit too heavy for something this simple but useful.

Don’t get me wrong, the mashup platform vendors are right to look elsewhere when committing development and marketing resources; this would have to be a volume business and a tough one at that. But at the same time there is real value here for either the widget vendors, a start-up, or (more likely) the BI vendors who will use this kind of presentation mashup to drive license use and application stickiness.

What do you think? Has anyone seen these sorts of simple presentation mashups and widgets in action in a business context? Are the BI vendors farther along this path than I am giving them credit for?

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