We’ve entered a wild new world where users can create their own experiences and web environments. While this sounds strange, it’s true and it’s here. We had an interesting debate this week about a feature that we wanted on our site (I won’t share the feature) and the amount of development effort that it would take to create. In the past, developers would have to build the components, but in the new world of Web 2.0 there are applications that can be incorporated in YOUR application to deliver the functionality for the user that used to have to be home grown. This is the concept of ‘mash-up’ or taking pieces from different applications and ‘mashing’ them together to have a new application.

A great example of a ‘mashable’ application is Jaxter (jaxter.com). Jaxter allows users to add a Contact Me control to any of their social networking sites (or even their email signature line) and allow others to call or txt msg them without exposing their personal phone numbers. It’s a great application!

Another great site that finds interesting Web 2.0 (and mashable) sites is stumbleupon.com.

We’ve done the same thing with our site, iTaggit, in that you can use our database as an ‘electronic folio’ on a collection or an item and generate HTML code to embed the item into other websites. This allows users to share their music, art, antique, or other collections/items through different sites while only needing to maintain it on iTaggit.com