Mashup litmus test for Web 2.0 start-ups
Social music darling Last.fm announced this week that they are going to start a video service any minute now. Some folks apparently couldn't wait and just developed their own mashups in the mean time. — Take Lasttube for example.
Context & Ripple Effects
Last.fm moved into video days ago with a launch pitched at becoming 'the MTV of the Web 2.0 age', extending its custom-radio model into personalised video channels (Last.fm's video launch). Before the official feature arrived, impatient developers had already built Lasttube, an unofficial video layer on top of Last.fm data.
The episode lands on top of a year in which mashup growth accelerated through 2006, making this a litmus test: when a platform announces a feature its community has already hacked together, the independent builders either get validated or get made redundant by the official version.
First-order effects
- Lasttube's developers see their unofficial workaround rendered obsolete the moment Last.fm's own video section goes live, since the platform now offers natively what the mashup scraped together.
Second-order effects
- Other Web 2.0 music and media services watching Last.fm's MTV ambitions face the same exposure: any popular community mashup around their APIs is effectively a public roadmap the platform can absorb at will.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, open APIs function as free R&D for platforms — independent mashup builders de-risk feature demand, but the economic value of those experiments consistently reverts to the platform owner rather than the builder.
The trend: Web 2.0 platforms are increasingly treating community-built mashups as demand signals to be absorbed into official features, shifting value from independent hackers to the platform owners who control the underlying data.