One thing is absolutely crystal clear to even a casual observer of today's Web application space: there are an unprecedented number of phenomenal tools available (many of them free), but unless you want to have 25 tabs open in a browser window, it's pretty challenging to bring them all together in a useful way and coordinate and orchestrate their use.
In the enterprise space, there's been a long running category called composite applications. These were apps that I.T. could create that would bring together disparate business data and application functionality into a new application. Making this easier for enterprise I.T. was a key objective in the portal space, but it never gained the sort of traction everyone expected.
In the Web 2.0 area, composite applications are known as mashups and are the closest thing to a composite application (and some argue these are composite apps) and are at the core of why the internet is a platform and more and more hosted application providers are delivering API's which enable smart developers to pull together chunks of functionality and deliver a different and completely new application (browse over 3,500 mashups here).
But what about startups, small to midsize businesses, agencies and non-profit organizations, who'd like to simply and easily aggregate all of this disparate functionality together in one spot and cannot afford a composite app/mashup development effort?
Steve’s Social Stuff