Google Mashup Editor

» see editor.googlemashups.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Google Mashup Editor appeared at Google Developer Day in May 2007, in the middle of the short stretch when mashup was the word every conference program had to contain. The premise was that pulling two data sources onto one page was something ordinary developers wanted to do often enough that it deserved a tool of its own. Google's answer was a code editor that ran inside a browser tab and published whatever you built to a googlemashups.com address.

You wrote HTML with extra tags in it. One tag pulled an RSS or Atom feed and another dropped the items onto a map, with the editor doing the plumbing in between. It could read from Google Base and write back into feeds that belonged either to your application or to a single user. The editor itself was built on Google Web Toolkit and borrowed CodePress for syntax highlighting, which made it one of the earliest real development environments Google put inside a web page.

In 2007 I was still at university and reading the same tech blogs everyone else read, where mashup was that year's word. Google Mashup Editor was a thing I read about rather than a thing I opened. It never came off the invitation list in the whole two years it existed, which is a strange sentence to write about a product that shipped and then got buried.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it actually did ~

The demos were the demos of the era. Take a feed of events and drop the locations onto a map, with a form field on the side to filter it. Take Google Base listings and render them as a sortable table. None of this was hard by 2007, but all of it took a server, and the editor's real offer was that Google would be that server for you. For a student or a hobbyist, hosting was the expensive part of an idea, and this made it free.

The trap was the tag set. Everything you learned was specific to Google's markup, running inside Google's editor, deployed to Google's hosting. There was no export and no local runtime, so a working application could not be lifted out and put anywhere else. People noticed this at the time and it is part of why the beta stayed small even after the invitations went out more widely.

~ the day it died ~

On 14 January 2009 Vic Gundotra posted a list. Google Video stopped accepting uploads, Google Notebook stopped taking new users, Dodgeball and Jaiku were handed over or shut, Catalog Search was retired, and the Mashup Editor went with them. The line about the editor was that existing applications would stop receiving traffic in six months, and that the team hoped users would join them in the transition to App Engine.

Six months put the end in July 2009. The editor address stopped answering, the hosted applications went dark, and the project blog posted its goodbye. It was one of the cleanest shutdowns Google ever ran, in the sense that everybody got told the exact number of days they had. It was also a shutdown of something almost nobody had been allowed to use.

~ the next chapter ~

App Engine got the developers, and it was genuinely the better product: a real runtime underneath, with no proprietary tag set on top. Google's own line in the shutdown post was that App Engine did everything the Mashup Editor did and more, which was true and which also admitted the editor had been a dead end for a year already.

What did not survive was the category. Microsoft Popfly closed in August 2009, one month after this. Yahoo Pipes lasted until September 2015 on the strength of being genuinely useful, then went the same way. The mashup only worked while the big sites left their feeds open and free, and by 2012 almost all of them had put a key on the door and started charging for the key.

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