In my last post I talked about how the Google APIs can provide your website with some incredible functionality as well as a huge productivity boost for your development team. But Google isn’t the only player, in fact, providing APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) is fast becoming a common practice of progressive web based services. You’ll find most of the functionality offered by Google, Amazon, Yahoo, eBay, Del.icio.us and many others is made available to through APIs.

Mashups are web sites that use third party APIs, like those mentioned above,  to create new content and functionality by mashing together data and functionality from different vendors.  Although many of the currently popular mashups involve leveraging the Google Maps API, it is by no means the only style of mashup. With so many web services offering APIs the creative possibilities are endless. A search for mashups will provide many examples of what’s possible.

Although it’s true most of these APIs requires a fair amount of development experience to use effectively, there are a number of tools available to help the novice developer and even the non developer create some pretty cool mashups.

If you have some development experience take a look at the Google Mashup Editor. If you’re not a developer you can still create some very cool mashups with Pipes from Yahoo. It’s fast, easy and quite a lot of fun. If nothing else, you’re sure to find some inspiration from some of the example mashups being created.

Here’s an interesting mashup created with Yahoo Pipes that helps you find an Apartment Near Something.

But don’t get caught in the rut of thinking mashups are only about mashing content to build new applications. Sometimes a mashup is simply mashing content to produce new content like this classic video mashup.