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One example of such a "mash-up" is built on Google Maps, and geographically displays the location of flats for rent on Craigslist. Many different sites are supported by the software, although the service makes use of "extractors" rather than official APIs.

Extractors can be created by pointing and clicking on areas of interest in

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a website. These extractors are then made available to the rest of the community.

"We see extraction of data from HTML as being purely a gateway technology, to allow us to discover which services people like, and what kinds of data they want to combine," says a statement on the Mash Maker website.

"If a particular data source becomes very popular, then we will work with the content providers to provide their content to Mash Maker users through a more efficient high level API."

Currently the browser plugin only works with Firefox, although Internet Explorer and Safari versions are planned for the future.

A similar service was launched last year by Yahoo, called Pipes, which allows RSS feeds to be combined and manipulated.