"Suddenly, hordes of volunteer programmers are taking it upon themselves to combine and remix the data and services of unrelated, even competing sites. The result: entirely new offerings they call "mash-ups." They're the Web versions of Reese's ("Hey, you got peanut butter on my chocolate!") Peanut Butter Cups.
"The Web was originally designed to be mashed up," says Google Web developer Aaron Boodman, the 27-year-old creator of a program called Greasemonkey that makes it easy to create and use mash-ups. "The technology is finally growing up and making it possible."
...People are seizing far more control of what they do online. In the process, those efforts are putting skin on the bones of Web services, the long-delayed promise of software and services that can be tapped on demand. "They're taking little bits and pieces from a number of companies and stitching them together in some clever way," Amazon Chief Executive Jeffrey P. Bezos noted recently. "You'll start to see the real power of Web services.""
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