Five mash-up creators to munch on

A mash-up is a site that pulls data from one site or service — such as Google Maps or Twitter — and uses it in a unique way. There are mash-ups for finding a bus in San Francisco, or adding your RSS feed to your Facebook status. It's pretty much anything that pulls data from one Web site and use it in another, often creating unique apps that would not exist otherwise. Here are five tools that can help you create your own mash-up. Let me know in comments in you try one out.

Yahoo Pipes
Pipes — named after the Unix Pipe command — is one of the more powerful editors that can take RSS feeds and combine them, feed data into a Web application, let you "geocode" a map by adding data pop-ups to a map (such as Reuters news by geographic location), and create widgets that can be used on a Web site. It has a Library for loading modules, a Cavas for assembling Pipes, and a debugger. It's really as easy as choosing your sources, assembling them, and compiling the Pipes code.

Microsoft PopFly
This showcase for Microsoft Silverlight — a kind of Java replacement that is powering the official NBC Olympics site for video streaming — allows you to mix and match data from multiple Web sites, or create games that link multiple players together without having to write any Web code. It's a bit more graphical than Yahoo Pipes but perhaps not as powerful, depending on what you want to do. It excels at combining photos and RSS feeds, and has a better site design engine than other tools.

Intel Mash Maker
Mash Maker is a browser plug-in that works with Firefox and IE, and has a more extensive interface that lets you sort data into tables, store favorite mash-ups, add sticky notes, and design mash-ups on the fly. It's more like an end-user tool that lets you create your own mash-ups, as opposed to a full-fledged mash-up editor such as Yahoo Pipes that is intended for developers to create mash-ups they share with other users.

Google Mashup Editor
More for the technically minded, Google Mash-Up Editor lets you take RSS feeds and enhance them with declarative XML tags, JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. The editor uses Ajax UI commands, and the data can come from Google Maps, Google Code, or Google Base — plus any other external feed. It's essentially a text editor where you place your own code into the programming window.

Dapper
Dapper uses a wizard approach to creating a mash-up, allowing you to indicate which feed you want to use for a mash-up or even just search for a term such as "video" and then use a feed that way. The mash-up — called a Dapp — pulls data from multiple sites and lets you create a widget or your own XML content that can be added to your Web sites. For example, you can create a Dapp that lets users search for certain kinds of YouTube.com videos.