Intel Gets Into the Mashup Game

ScreenshotIntel has joined the ranks of those companies allowing users to revise (or to use the trendy term, “mash up”) the web with the release of a beta version of Intel Mash Maker. Their site proclaims this as “Mashups for the Masses” and indeed, though there are a few rough edges, the product is easy to use. Although not every site (or every internet user) will benefit from this application, it shows real promise.

Unlike some other mashup tools, Mash Maker runs largely on the client side. Rather than combining parts of disparate web sites via APIs to create a new site, it instead lets you customize your own view of a page. If you’ve used GreaseMonkey in Firefox, you have some idea of how this works, but Mash Maker uses a widgets approach with a toolbar to make things easier.ScreenshotMost users will just want to install Mash Maker (it works with Firefox, including version 3, and IE) and refer to its toolbar. The toolbar notifies you when a mashup is available (published mashups are tracked on Intel’s own servers) and lets you open it with a single click. For example, you can enhance eBay Motors listings with a separate panel showing photos of your search results, with hyperlinks to the actual results. Other examples include adding a map to CNN news, or a scatter plot for Craigslist showing apartment prices versus number of bedrooms. If you like a mashup, you can tell Mash Maker to always show it when you’re on that page.

Developers will want to pop open the Mash Maker side panel to build their own. Here you have the ability to create a new extractor, which can read structured data from a web page. Mash Maker uses screenscraping rather than APIs to extract data, though they say they’ll be adding API access for the most popular sites. After creating an extractor (which is surprisingly easy), you can view the data from the page, or create a mashup by combining widgets from a library. The library includes such things as notes, annotations, maps, and tables; you can also use Google Gadgets, which gives you access to a great many more customizations for a page.

After you’re happy with your extractor and mashup, you can publish them for other users. In addition to the toolbar suggestions, Mash Maker maintains a Mashup Showcase with contributed mashups. Intel rate-limits its screen scraping to avoid overloading servers, and also offers site owners the ability to opt out entirely.

Mash Maker is under fairly intense development, and the developer interface and APIs are still being polished. But already it offers a quick way to add features – such as mapping or annotations – that might otherwise be tough to strap on to an existing site.

Comments have been disabled for this post