First, you should think about the subject that you want to address with your mashup. Lets say you plan on making a mashup with the best pizza places in town, something that you and your friends can share and pass on among everyone living in the community. The rule is to keep it simple in the beginning and to expand afterwards. Keeping it simple and focusing on the subject will help you figure out what APIs and tools to use. A good place to start looking for APIs is here.
Next, you need to think about the source for your information. For your pizza place mashup, you will need to enter most of the information yourself or allow other users to add data, for other mashups you might want to go with APIs from vendors like Flickr or eBay.
Now you need to figure out, how much of the coding you want to do yourself or if you plan on getting help from tools like MapBuilder. Depending on your skills, you will be able to do most of the coding yourself, especially if you plan a simple mashup and have some time on your hands. Of course, if the mashup gets more complicated, so will the coding and you might be more likely to “outsource” some of the work for time’s sake. Also, you’ll need to think about server and programming language.
After you have signed up for an API (which should take no more than a few minutes in most cases) your last step is to start coding. Countless good tutorials exist on the web, consult Google for more.
