Intel Mash Maker: Mashups for the Masses

[mandy]

There has been a lot of hype about mashups recently, and with good reason. Mashups are allowing us to transform the Internet from being a collection of separate website islands, into a unified intelligence in which knowledge from one web site can be automatically combined with knowledge from another.

But 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.

Intel Mash Maker is a research project at Intel Research that is attempting to produce a solution, and I’m pleased to say I’m quite excited about 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. If you click on one of these buttons, Mash Maker will apply that Mashup to your page. This might mean plotting all items on a map, annotating each flight with the expected legroom, or anything else. The cool thing about this is that you don’t need to know that there are mashups you might find useful —- the mashups come to you...

full announcement: http://blogs.intel.com/research/2007/09/...asses.html
Intel Mash Maker: http://mashmaker.intel.com/