Online services tearing down walls, sharing content

Once littered with walled gardens and content silos, the digital landscape is beginning to sprout a customer-friendly ecosystem of shared content and traffic. Fueling this newfound spirit of interoperability are technologies that enable the sharing of content between sites. They include the Open Social initiative and Facebook's open development platform, both driving the "widgetization" of the Web. It's also a reflection of the surging "mash-up" movement online. A mash-up is a Web application that combines content and features from multiple sources for a specific purpose that none of the contributors do individually. The most commonly used applications are those with easily embeddable content or open APIs (programming information available to all), such as Google Maps, Twitter and Last.fm.