[DonHopkins]

The epitome of the fad of integrating two seemingly unrelated things that somebody else made in order to create a unique hack was the ProgrammableWeb: Mashup Matrix [1].

It had all known web services along each edge, so people without any original ideas or will to write their own code could check if "It's like X for Y" had been taken yet, in order to impress their investors that their unique snowflake of an gimmick to effortlessly combine two other company's hard work together was a viable unicorn seed.

Eventually there were so many web services that it became like checking the Million Dollar Home Page [2] to see if one particular pixel was already taken.

<s>But we've moved far beyond that, fortunately.</s> Why stop at two dimensional matrices? Are there actually any practical mashups left that limit themselves to using only two other web services, these days?

Web 2.0 is to "It's like X for Y!" as Web 3.0 is to "It's like X for Y with Z!"

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20100829232918/http://www.progra...

[2] http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/