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.'"

more info in the summary

[Anonymous Coward]

what is a mashup for those of us who dont subscribe to all this web2.0 nonsense?

What's REALLY needed

[Colin Smith]

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.

 

What's a "mashup"?

[HateBreeder]

Besides, you'd expect something like this (Software Research) from Microsoft or Google... But Intel?!

Abusable?

[rancher dan 3]

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.

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

[Blackknight]

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:The "2.0" ness escapes more than newbies.

[sarahbau]

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.

[grommit]

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."

WTF is a mashup?

[noidentity]

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.

Re:Mashups are...

[glwtta]

That's what I love about Wikipedia - often you don't even need to read most of the text, just the quality of writing tells you everything you need to know.

"a Mashup is used in order to make a certain source of information exponentially more useful", translation: "complete bullshit; a nearly nonsensical term made up by some 14 year-old with a hard-on for MySpace".

I sure hope these Mashups will be all Web 2.0, and lets not forget to crowdsource some folksonomies, too.

the truth is

[pair-a-noyd]

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:The "2.0" ness escapes more than newbies.

[Myopic]

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:The "2.0" ness escapes more than newbies.

[klenwell]

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?

Re:the truth is

[crush]

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:The "2.0" ness escapes more than newbies.

[krbvroc1]

You know, I could probably visit any retirement home in the world and roll up a bunch of old people who will tell you that computers are useless and stupid. Would that parallel help back up your argument?

I don't think its really a fair comparison. The issue here is not technology versus a non-technology generation. It is an evolution of companies trying to package what used to require more thought/skill/programming/configuration into something that is a simple tool for the masses. It a layer of abstraction that seems to be more hype than anything. The problem with a lot of this stuff is that by adding extra layers of abstraction the users of the technology forget/never learn what is really going on behind the scenes.

Re:more info in the summary

[Anonymous Coward]

Well... seing the video's in Quicktime on a Mac, i still have no idea as the video's itself are quite mashedup :):)

Guess their using a codec that's not so well known or so?

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

[morcego]

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 the web technology field was CSS and XHTML. Flash, Javascript, Java, Shockwave Director, ActiveX ... I just keep asking myself: "Why?" These days, every stupid webpage needs Javascript and has some flash nonsense on it.

Granted, I use xterm, read my e-mail on Mutt, run IceWM, keep javascript (NoScript) and Java (always) disabled, and generally block flash. What happened to keeping things simple ? That old Emacs joke seems now to apply to web browsers: "(Firefox|IE|Opera|Mozilla) is an excellent operating system, all it lacks is a good web browser."

I've found out that, as a rule of thumb, the flashier the site, the worst the content. Hummm, maybe that is why they do it ...

Re:more info in the summary

[fractoid]

So... it's web services. The same thing that was tried and never really took off over the last few years, but now it's got a pukesomely 'trend-enabled' new moniker and so it's news again? Sometimes I hate the internet.

Re:I've noticed...

[dbIII]

The more clueless business people also like "spiraling". The ironic or simple sad thing is they think in purely linear terms so think something going up exponentially is just a really steep line. As for order of magnitude - I suppose the way they use it works properly for base 2 and small numbers. The answer is to improve pre-college education (all they really get) and cut off their cocaine supply - or outsource management to a country with decent education system.