Mashups are no longer interesting technical exercises, they are creating entirely new business models and also form an essential method of creating business intelligence tools. Here are six tools to assist in tinkering with the workings of the web.

Yahoo Pipes

Pipes is one of the most popular tools for creating simple mashups, possibly due to it’s reasonably intuitive interface. I used it recently for an experiment in trying to find appropriate images to illustrate a twitter feed.

Zembly

Zembly from Sun Microsystems is a slightly more technical mashup builder. Like Yahoo’s pipes, it allows you to publish components and use components published by others, however it’s end delivery is far better defined. Zembly is geared towards creating apps for various platforms such as Facebook apps, Meebo apps, OpenSocial apps, iPhone apps, Google Gadgets, embeddable widgets, and other social applications. It does require a reasonable knowledge of javascript and HTML in order to build anything, but offers a wealth of powerful functionality.

Dapper

Dapper provides a specific but vital service in mashup building. A service for extracting information from the web in a re-usable form. This could be as simple as creating an RSS feed from a site to building an API for working with published data.

Microsoft Popfly

Popfly is Microsoft’s mashup builder, it’s nicest feature is the way that components can be plonked together in a purely drag & drop kind of way, or you can drill deeper and add code to implement more complex functionality.

WSO₂ Mashup Server

WSO₂ Mashup Server provides a more heavyweight platform for building mashups. It has facilities for creating secure APIs for existing datasources in addition to being able to consume external services and data sources. This is much more of an Enterprise-level offering.

Google Mashup Editor

Google Mashup Editor is a framework for building mashups using Google’s extensive collection of APIs. The end results usually rely on users signing in with their Google account but for creating gadgets for iGoogle, it’s a good option to try.

Thanks have to go to Dion Hinchcliffe for helping me research these.