According to Wikipedia (at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mashup_(web_application_hybrid)) ...
There are many types of mashups, such as consumer mashups, data mashups, and business mashups. The most common type of mashup is the consumer mashup, aimed at the general public.
Data mashups combine similar types of media and information from multiple sources into a single representation. An example is the Havaria Information Services' AlertMap, which combines data from over 200 sources related to severe weather conditions, biohazard threats, and seismic information, and displays them on a map of the world or Chicago Crime Map, which indicates the crime rate and location of crime in Chicago.
Business mashups focus data into a single presentation and allow for collaborative action among businesses and developers. This works well for an Agile Development project, which requires collaboration between the Developers and Customer proxy for defining and implementing the business requirements.
Mashup use is expanding in the business environment. Business Mashups are useful for integrating business and data services, as Business Mashups technologies provide the ability to develop new integrated services quickly, to combine internal services with external or personalized information, and to make these services tangible to the business user through user-friendly Web browser interfaces.
Business mashups differ from consumer mashups in the level of integration with business computing environments, security and access control features, governance, and the sophistication of the programming tools (mashup editors) used. Another difference between business mashups and consumer mashups is a growing trend of using Business Mashups in commercial software as a service offering.
After several years of standards development, mainstream businesses are starting to adopt Service-oriented architectures (SOA) to integrate disparate data by making this data available as discrete Web services (Microsoft prefers the term XML Web Services to indicate standards-based SOA services). Web services provide open, standardized protocols to provide a unified means of accessing information from a diverse set of platforms (operating systems, programming languages, applications). These Web services can be reused to provide completely new services and applications within and across organizations, providing business flexibility.
Many of the providers of Business Mashup technologies have added SOA features.
Architecturally, there are two styles of mashups: Web-based and server-based. Whereas Web-based mashups typically use the user's Web browser to combine and reformat the data, server-based mashups analyze and reformat the data on a remote server and transmit the data to the user's browser in its final form.
Do you need a mash up? If your business is on the internet, and if you have multiple products and services, then you need a mashup.
One example you can check is http://www.creativeinfoonline.com. The purpose of this mash up is to draw information from multiple internet sources, provide a safe environment where anyone can search, and provide lots of tips and tricks about major consumer and search topics, like finance, cars, etc.
Take a look around this site, and then build your own mash up. You'll be glad you did.
