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The Internet Intel Software

Intel Releases Mashups for the Masses 180

Posted by Zonk from the applying-data-to-the-situation-for-the-win dept.
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.'"
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Intel Releases Mashups for the Masses More

Intel Releases Mashups for the Masses

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  • more info in the summary (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 23, 2007 @01:22PM (#20720765)
    what is a mashup for those of us who dont subscribe to all this web2.0 nonsense?

  • What's REALLY needed (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Colin Smith ( 2679 ) on Sunday September 23, 2007 @01:22PM (#20720769)
    Is to wire the balls of whoever thought up the word "mashup" to the mains supply and to shock them until they repent and take it back.

     
    • 'Mashup' is far better than 'blog'. But, I still prefer "Web Page"

    • Re:What's REALLY needed (Score:5, Funny)

      by springbox ( 853816 ) on Sunday September 23, 2007 @02:07PM (#20721103)
      That didn't work for "podcast" ..
      • Or blog. Really? Vomiting sound? That's a word?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Fred_A ( 10934 )

        That didn't work for "podcast" ..
        Or for "surfing" back when Wired coined that stupid term. I still haven't forgiven them for that (nor for ruining my eyes)

    • Re:What's REALLY needed (Score:5, Funny)

      by GreyPoopon ( 411036 ) <gpoopon@gma i l .com> on Sunday September 23, 2007 @04:29PM (#20722127)

      Is to wire the balls of whoever thought up the word "mashup" to the mains supply and to shock them until they repent and take it back.

      Don't tase me, bro!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Ant P. ( 974313 )
      Oh come on, that's just nasty.

      At least do it till they're sterile.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Goaway ( 82658 )
      There's nothing wrong with the word "mashup". It's a handy word for remixing several songs into one.

      Didn't know IBM was into music, though.

  • What's a "mashup"? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by HateBreeder ( 656491 ) on Sunday September 23, 2007 @01:26PM (#20720799)
    Besides, you'd expect something like this (Software Research) from Microsoft or Google... But Intel?!

  • Abusable? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by rancher dan 3 ( 960065 )
    This seems like it's ripe for abuse by people trying to drive web traffic to their sites. If the signal to noise ratio doesn't get out of hand almost instantly, I'll be surprised.

  • Joyous Day! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Jane Q. Public ( 1010737 ) on Sunday September 23, 2007 @01:27PM (#20720823)
    Wow! Now I can have Dictionary.com give me definitions of the names of all the streets in my town via Google Maps. Just what I need!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Fred_A ( 10934 )

      Wow! Now I can have Dictionary.com give me definitions of the names of all the streets in my town via Google Maps. Just what I need!
      With recipes and fashion suggestions too !

  • Mashups are... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Dr. Stavros ( 808432 ) on Sunday September 23, 2007 @01:31PM (#20720855) Homepage
    Karma-whoring Wikipedia-link explanation of mashups [wikipedia.org]. Thanks!

  • The "2.0" ness escapes more than newbies. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Chonine ( 840828 ) on Sunday September 23, 2007 @01:36PM (#20720891)

    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.

    • Re:The "2.0" ness escapes more than newbies. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Blackknight ( 25168 ) on Sunday September 23, 2007 @01:40PM (#20720927) Homepage
      Sounds like most of the people I know. I think web 2.0 appeals to a younger crowd, seems to be mostly teenagers on those sites.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )
        Web 2.0, except for a couple of notable exceptions (like Google Maps) appeals mostly to a crowd who likes to waste time.

        I've got a zillion "application" invites on Facebook to prove it. No practical use, every one.
        • And who do you think has the time to waste? Kids.

        • I've got a zillion "application" invites on Facebook to prove it. No practical use, every one.

          I finally gave in a few months ago, and put up a basic (and highly restricted) profile.

          The good news is that I was able to connect with a number of old friends whom I've long lost track of -- people I haven't spoke to in 10 - 15 years, many of whom were good friends, but with whom I lost touch when a) I moved somewhere else, or b) they started new families (and more often than not, moved somewhere else).

          But do

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )
            I bumped into a bunch of people from my home town I haven't talked to in ten years, classmates, people I've met traveling... Facebook itself isn't a bad idea. It was actually pretty good before the flood of third party apps. I wonder if I could write an app to automatically reject app invitations.

            That seems to be a common theme. Some of the sites are pretty decent ideas, even useful, but then they go overboard with their "web 2.0ness" and become more effort than they're worth.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by vux984 ( 928602 )
              but then they go overboard with their "web 2.0ness" and become more effort than they're worth.

              And their lock-in-ness. I don't want to join a private web site to talk to people. I already have email that works everywhere.

              And their personal information vacuuming. I don't want to pay for my ability to talk to my friends with my personal information. Again, email is free. And if I want a fancy blog and don't want to host it myself I'd like the option to fucking pay for it with my money instead of my data.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Sancho ( 17056 )
        Honestly, I'd suspect that it's more like an old dog not interested in learning new tricks. Web 2.0 has a large social aspect. It's about communicating when you aren't in person (like IRC, only flashier.) It's about getting the information you want out of a website and ignoring the chaff.

        To take an example from the grandparent post, RSS is a great tool for keeping up on website content. Rather than going to every site you wish to keep up with, every day (this includes news sites, not just fluff), you ca

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Bri3D ( 584578 )
        I dunno, I'm 16 and few of my friends are into Web2.0.
        The ones who are tend to
        A) Run Ubuntu
        B) Be unable to do anything without a tutorial (this seems to be a trend amongst Ubuntu users too, where did the ability to figure things out yourself go?)
        C) Obsess over vector tracing to make icons (maybe this is why web2.0 has so damn many icons?)
        D) Not have a girlfriend

    • Re:The "2.0" ness escapes more than newbies. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by sarahbau ( 692647 ) on Sunday September 23, 2007 @01:48PM (#20720981)
      Same with me. I hadn't even heard of a mashup before. I had to look it up to find out what this news post was talking about. I really don't understand the point of most of this Web 2.0 stuff, but some people seem to like it.

    • Re:The "2.0" ness escapes more than newbies. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by grommit ( 97148 ) on Sunday September 23, 2007 @01:52PM (#20721013)
      Just keep doing your own thing. There's always going to be people that want to be a part of the "Next Big Thing" and are more than willing to bash the rest of us over the head with how great it is. Personally I, much like you, prefer a few simple apps that get minor refinements from time to time and just get my work done while MashRails and RubyUps and so on burn brightly for a few months only to be replaced by the "Next Big Thing."

    • Re:The "2.0" ness escapes more than newbies. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Myopic ( 18616 ) on Sunday September 23, 2007 @02:22PM (#20721191)
      Yeah I agree. I have my CS degree and I love my internet, but I came of web-age in 1997, 8 and 9, so I like email and web pages more than the techs that have come out to replace them.

      Social networking sites are starting to grow on me, but only a tiny bit. I do love podcasts, because ever since I was a child I thought TV with commercials, no pause/record/playback, and on someone else's schedule was folly. Some people call them podcasts, I just call them radio: now I listen to my radio/tv from a menu (the menu on my iPod) instead of from a guide (the TV Guide).

      RSS feeds are pretty sweet but frankly not sweet enough for me to go out and discover on my own, so I appreciate ones that come to me for free (specifically, Firefox's RSS news link). My calendar hangs on my wall, and I find that more convenient than any computer calendar I've ever found, but that's probably because I'm a simple guy and don't need to schedule more than a couple things on any given day, at most. I can understand the benefit of a Google Calendar to people who are very busy and need to coordinate with lots of other people. Also, for egoists.

      Same with Flickr. I love my digicam but I don't have much of a compulsion to show my pics to the rest of the world. They're on my own site, they're not hidden or anything, but I don't need to share them actively.

      I never got into chat either. I've used it as a tool and it's okay, but I much prefer email because it is non-live. I like audio chat when it works with something else I'm doing. For instance, when I play card games online (I like euchre), I can audio chat with the other participants, and that improves the experience.

      Web 2.0 stuff is pretty compelling. Google Maps is the bomb (true that, double true). I appreciate the more complex and compelling interfaces offered on the web today. There was a time in 2000, 2001 and thereabouts where companies were putting all kinds of applications on the web, but the web wasn't up to the task, so we were all doing things on the web that we should have been doing on desktop apps. Now things are a lot better. My bank's website has animated windows that fade in and out and overlap, and it's an interface just about as compelling as any desktop app I've used.

      This is trite and perhaps obvious, but one thing the internet is fantastically perfect for is... porn. My god, what if we all still had to go out and walk to a porno theatre to see stag films? That would be terrible.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mwvdlee ( 775178 )

        My bank's website has animated windows that fade in and out and overlap, and it's an interface just about as compelling as any desktop app I've used.

        Since this was the only actual example of a Web 2.0 interface you gave, I assume you were being sarcastic?

        Just because the web is now able to do all kinds or magic and shiny user interfaces, doesn't mean anybody actually wants it. Give me a boring and simple interface any day.

    • Re:The "2.0" ness escapes more than newbies. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by klenwell ( 960296 ) <klenwell@gmail. c o m> on Sunday September 23, 2007 @02:41PM (#20721331) Homepage Journal
      But for some reason, this newfangled web doesn't seem to appeal to me, my friends, or anyone I know.

      I hear you. I actually had an idea the other day that I thought would be perfect for Yahoo Pipes. The thing was, the web page that was the source for the key data to be mashed-up, though a classic HTML data table, didn't offer an RSS feed. And Pipes doesn't seem to offer even the most basic page scraping utility. (If it does, I couldn't find it.)

      After playing around with Yahoo Pipes for a half-hour trying to make it work, I realized that with my knowledge of PHP, I could do this just as easily on my own. And have much more control over the process and end product.

      The conclusion I came to: anyone who is capable of imaginatively using these tools is probably more than capable of just rolling their own mashup using open-source scripting tools. I don't imagine most ordinary users are going to be able to create anything more inventive than a regurgitated RSS feed.

      Please correct me if I'm wrong. Anyone have any interesting examples of something produced with this kind of pre-packaged mashup tool?
      • Gee, have you seen half the FF extensions that are out there? There's quite a few that are along the lines of "Adds cute smilies to your MySpace posts". Thanks, that's useful.
      • As a PHP dev, I initially thought the same thing, but have since found a few uses for Yahoo Pipes, mostly for filtering out unwanted messages from RSS feeds. This is not really a mashup since there is only one data source, but pipes is great for filtering out my own edits and entries from wikis [yahoo.com] and SourceForge trackers [yahoo.com]. While I could have written my own script pretty easily to do the same thing, each pipe only took a few minutes to put together and is pretty easily reconfigurable to other similar needs.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by geekgirlandrea ( 1148779 )
      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: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by morcego ( 260031 )

      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.

      I'm glad I'm not alone.

      I remember the first time I saw Java one a browser. I think it was 1995 or 96. I just asked myself "why?". The only really useful thing I've seem since 1996 on

  • http://www.willitblend.com/ [willitblend.com] Will it Blend?

  • Firefox only (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Animats ( 122034 ) on Sunday September 23, 2007 @01:47PM (#20720973) Homepage

    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: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by allcar ( 1111567 )
      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.

    • There will be a larger number of IT tinkerers running Firefox than IE. Most IE users run it because they think it is "the internet". Anyone who has had the initiative to install FF or actually run a different operating system will be much more likely to give this a try.

  • WTF is a mashup? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by noidentity ( 188756 ) on Sunday September 23, 2007 @01:55PM (#20721029)
    Article summary could have had a few extra words summarizing what a "mashup" is. To me it sounds like what I do with my potatoes before I eat them.

  • the truth is (Score:5, Insightful)

    by pair-a-noyd ( 594371 ) on Sunday September 23, 2007 @02:09PM (#20721113)
    older folks such as myself don't use this mashup crap because it sounds STUPID.
    The name alone implies that it's some sort of hap-hazardly created frankenstein stuff that 10 year olds create.
    The name does not indicate at all, in any way what a mashup is or does.

    It just sounds stupid and totally un-professional.

    No, I'm not trolling, this isn't flamebait, I'm giving MY take on it from the perspective of someone near 50 years old.

    Why not call this stuff, what ever it is, by a name that gives people a sense of what it's about?

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by crush ( 19364 )
      Yahoo has a nicer name: Pipes [yahoo.com]. Admittedly it's just a straightforward rip-off of the UNIX concept, but it's more expressive of what's happening really. Someone pointed out that the whole Web2.0 thing is just taking whatever good CLI stuff worked nicely and slapping a webpage interface on top of it. So:
      • email --> GMail, YahooMail, Hotmail
      • chaining commands through pipes --> mashups
      • usenet --> webforums

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by zullnero ( 833754 )
      It does have its uses.

      For example, when I was looking for my current apartment, I wanted to see all available apartments on craigslist that were within sane walking distance from where I worked. By mashing up google maps and craigslist, you get a pushpins on the map type of view, without having to grab 30 or so and search them individually. Saved me a lot of time and a heck of a lot of web searches.

      One could apply the same thing to trying to find the closest veterinarian, closest hospital, bike repair sho

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by martinX ( 672498 )
        >>There's no reason to whine about how the world is leaving you behind.

        "I used to be 'with it', but then they changed what 'it' was. Now what I'm with isn't 'it', and what's 'it' seems weird and scary."
        (Abe Simpson)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Myopic ( 18616 )
      Yes. From now on let's call mashups "blowjobs".

    • You JUST don't GET it, do you?

      Well, neither do I, and I'm 20 years your junior. It's not your age, friend, and you're not alone.

  • "my mother" "mashup" "tools" "mashup bars" "intel release" "mashup here, mashup there" "mash the mashing mash up" .....

    your mother's mashup with what tools ? and intel ? what kind of slashdot pos is this ?

    dont play games with /.ers' minds in the dead of the night.

  • They did the mash... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Chris Mattern ( 191822 ) on Sunday September 23, 2007 @02:54PM (#20721447)
    ...they did the website mash
    The website mash
    It was a network smash!

    Chris Mattern

  • We did it! (Score:5, Funny)

    by redcaboodle ( 622288 ) on Sunday September 23, 2007 @03:03PM (#20721529)
    We actually slashdotted Intel.
  • How on earth are they going to remove the vocals from I Am The Walrus?
  • Their mailer seems to have been ./ed, it keeps insisting it can't send me mail when it clearly hasn't tried.
  • Yes, like others have said, we don't need the 20th iteration of "Mash-up Maker" that lets us link to Google maps and have yet another proof of concept. The best use for mashups are behind the firewall, bringing together diverse sources of data that everyone struggles with a work.

    I have server logs, databases, wikis, sysedge data, snmp information, ticketing system information, and I have to visit 20 different web pages a day to get all my information. Now, mash THAT INFORMATION up and give it to me in one
  • Yahoo Pipes [yahoo.com] does this much better AFAICT. And it's been around for almost a year now. AND it's a good place to look if you can't quite pin the meaning of this new buzzword called "Mashup". (I'll explain it in a different post)
  • Mashups target dynamic web-readiness and are often used to exploit visionary ROI in order to syndicate front-end systems. In order to exploit ubiquitous bandwidth Mashups can also be utilzed to unleash efficient e-business and envisioneer intuitive applications.

    Hope that helps.

    ... (What really scares me that most of the above actually makes a strange sort of sense) ...

    [Disclaimer: Large portions of this post where generated using the official Web Economy Bullshit Generator [dack.com] in order to aggregate web-enabled

  • Not necessarily stupid (Score:3, Informative)

    by lee1 ( 219161 ) <lee@lee-phillipFREEBSDs.org minus bsd> on Monday September 24, 2007 @09:02AM (#20728275) Homepage
    After reading Intel's description of their product I have no interest, but the mashup idea, despite the stupid name, had its early expression in some really brilliant and useful work. Check out http://www.chicagocrime.org/ [chicagocrime.org] for a superb example. Of course, this was created by programming (using the nifty django framework, which uses python, by one of its creators) rather than by clicking on a toolbar.

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