Intel Releases Mashups for the Masses

News_and_info writes "Intel has released an online tool called Mash Maker with the intent of allowing anyone to create mashups. They offer some training on how to use it, but the tool is fairly easy to use out of the gate. I see it more as a rudimentary semantic browser. From the article: 'Mashups have still not really penetrated the mainstream. My mother is not using mashup sites, and she is definitely not creating them. Even if there was a mashup out there that did exactly what she wanted, the chances are that she wouldn't know it existed, and would be confused by it if she tried to use it ... With Mash Maker, mashups are part of the normal browsing experience. As you browse the web, the Mash Maker toolbar displays buttons representing mashups that Mash Maker thinks you might want to apply to your current page.'"

The "2.0" ness escapes more than newbies.

[Chonine]

More power to those out there that edit wikis religiously, blog daily, use and create mashups, get their news through an RSS reader, can name their favorite 10 podcasts, share their Google calendars with their friends, have a FlickR and Delicious account, use 100 firefox plugins, and have an application-loaded Facebook among their many social networking sites - these can be some great tools with great utility to people.

But for some reason, this newfangled web doesn't seem to appeal to me, my friends, or anyone I know. I'm a Computer Science Masters student, and my friends work in industry. Am I backwards? Antiquated? Should I be mashing it up? I do it like I have for years - an xterm, an email app, an IM app, and a tabbed-to-the-hilt browser.

Firefox only

[Animats]

Note that it's Firefox-only. No Internet Explorer support.

Intel has lately started to move into Microsoft's space. Microsoft used to object when Intel did much with software on mainstream platforms, and Intel used to back off. Intel isn't backing off any more. Interesting.

Re:The "2.0" ness escapes more than newbies.

[geekgirlandrea]

Same here (well, I use RSS). I still use a pretty minimalist fvwm config to run Firefox, xterm and emacs, and that's about it. I just don't get how most of this "Web 2.0" stuff is supposed to different from, you know, hypertext like we were all doing in about 1995.

Re:Firefox only

[allcar]

This gives me wood! A massive commercial outfit like Intel producing stuff for FF only is really exciting. As an enterprise Web Developer, I know how much easier it is to develop for one browser only (especially if that browser is standards compliant (ie: not IE)) and this may well be just laziness on behalf of Intel's devs. Anyway, more power to their elbows.