Consumer financial services mashups, that a'boy!
Business Week Online published an interview with E*TRADE CIO Greg Framke earlier this week that focused on the usage of mashups to deliver better services. I am a strong believer in mashups continuing to put the power of the internet into the hands of users and letting them control their usage and interaction with content. We have widgets on the desktop, widgets within publisher sites or blogs, open APIs that provide access to core platforms and capabilities, all isolating aspects of web services that allow users and developers to extract functionality in order to deliver a tailored product or experience. It is very exciting, at the same time relieving, that a company like E*TRADE is embracing mashups to strengthen its relationships with customers.
Framke does a good job explaining some of the nuances and logic:
An application composite is two or more applications that are put together without a lot of new code, to present something very new and different to a customer. Mashups are something really different and something that's pretty exciting.
The idea is that you're taking your information and your presentation and you're breaking it down into components and giving it to people to reassemble in any shape or form that they want to reassemble it. Someone could take a component from E*Trade and mash it up with something from Quicken or Yahoo! or Google or anywhere they wanted, to form something that is new and interesting.
We think that the concept of mashups is going to be the way people will want to interact with the Internet. They want to be able to deal with it in the way they want to and not necessarily going to a destination Web site to do things. It's a little different than an application composite. But you need a common set of services in order to make both work.
This isn't a new spin on mashups, but it is yet another industry that leverages web services in its core offerings, acknowledging the power of user control. Internet companies, enterprise software companies, financial services companies. This is where things are going.
In a conversation I had with one of my closest friends, Jonathan (his blog may not be public), he said it best (paraphrasing, which is dangerous with Jonathan), "Companies need to stop thinking about customer lockin and need to start thinking about sustainable competitive differentiation. If a company allows a customer to leverage that company's, potentially with another companies', core platforms and capabilities to create a unique, personalized experience, a much stronger and sustainable relationship with the user is formed."
I agree and I like what is happening with the internet industry, although Jonathan has a good point about the term "Web 3.0" being a bit frightening. Kudos to E*TRADE and also to the team (and my co-workers) at Yahoo! for taking widgets, mashups and hacking to the masses and letting the community define its own product specs. Keep it up.
