Most mashups are very one-off, self contained little things. They may be useful for vertical purposes, which is fine – I need this, now. But in general they don’t lend themselves to er, generalisation. Dan Brickley just spotted an instance which is vertical, but only because the end-user (I can use that phrase, ya?) chose to do it that way: Data Scraping Wikipedia with Google Spreadsheets

I didn’t really understand from the blog post, fortunately Dan summarised he was quoting someone else, but who really cares on that:

In which they use Google Spreadsheets to convert a Wikipedia table to
an RSS feed and thence to live population maps via Yahoo pipes with no
coding required.

Some smarts required is clear on this, but the ability to wire disparate services in an arbitrary fashion apparently is possible. Who’d have thunk.