While this is a great way to extend and combine the power of different sites, there's no way my mother-in-law or my wife could create their own mashups, much less find one that did what they wanted (short of perhaps searching for it via Google). Certainly everyone's needs are different, and even if you found a mashup it might not do everything you wanted.

This is the set of problems Intel Mash Maker, an Intel Research project, wants to solve. First to allow non-programmers the ability to create such useful applets - and to share them, and second to make it easy to discover the available mashups for a site. As Intel told me, "it allows you to have the information you want, presented the way you want it."

Of course, Yahoo!'s Pipes and Microsoft’s Popfly are similar, but Mash Maker is software from Intel sans any hardware - there's a first time for everything, it seems.

Invitation-only until today at 8 AM Pacific Time, the site's now live for everyone. And for once, Firefox users get the lion's share of the goodness as, according to Intel, whom I spoke to in a private demo, the Firefox plug-in has been available for a longer time, meaning that there are more mashups available to Firefox users.

As Intel describes it:

Mash Maker is a browser extension that allows you to make the web the way you want it. Do you wish that OpenTable showed restaurants on a map, or Google News allowed one to browse stories by phono, or Expedia showed legroom for all its flights? If you use Mash Maker then you can modify them so that they do.

Mash Maker allows you to enhance the web pages you already use by applying mashups to them that enhance these existing web sites with extra information and visualizations. Each mashup is composed of a number of Widgets -- mini applications that understand the meaning of the page they are on and can enhance it in interesting wasy.

Mash Maker is not a "mashup service" or a "tool for creating mashup sites". The mashups created in Mash Maker are not new stand-alone services that users can navigate to, but instead an enhanced version of the existing web, layed on top of the existing network of web sites.

I met with Jeff Klaus, Marketing Director for Intel Mash Maker, Robert Ennals, Senior Researcher at Intel Research Berkeley, Intel Mash Maker Architect, and author of the FireFox plugin, and Dattatraya Kulkarni (Kulki), Program Manager, Intel Mash Maker, as well as Heather MacKinnon, and learned quite a bit, but still barely scratched the surface.

Let's assume you choose the Firefox extension, for example.

After you install the Firefox extension, you'll get a new toolbar (above, pictured with a simple Widget to embed Gmail on your Facebook home page). When you go to a different site, you'll see a variety of messages, including "Mash Maker is waiting for Firefox to render the page," and if there are available widgets, the above message, "Loading information about this domain from the Mash Maker server."

Once the page loads, if there are any associated mashups on the page, you'll see them listed on the toolbar. For example, the CNN page will show (at least right now), "embedded map" and "news map." Both of them will show the location of news stories, one of them embedded on the news page.

Embedded items can be moved around on a page, and moved to areas marked by different colors (see the picture in the CNN example).

pen the Expert Sidebar from the toolbar and you'll see a list of widgets, mashups, data and extractors (more on this later). You can vote on the associated mashups on a page, for example, in a Digg-like way.

You can only vote once, because, as you might assume, you need to register to use Mash Maker.

Why, you may ask? Well, since these mashups and widgets are user-created, much like a wiki, Intel needs a way to track them. After all, someone could create a malicious widget, right? Such users would be banned and their widgets deleted.

What else do they track? They're not interested in tracking your behavior per se. In fact, most of the information is kept in the client. Still, it would appear that Mash Maker could, if Intel wanted, track a lot of your browsing behavior. However, Intel spells out in detail exactly what is and isn't sent to and from their servers, right here, in their privacy policy.

Oh, and about those extractors? That's probably the most important part of the whole idea, and what makes this a collaborative effort among users. This is how Intel describes it:

To mash the web, we must first understand it. Mash Maker uses a collaboratively-edited shared database of extractors to extract meaning from pages on the web.

You can teach Mash Maker how to understand pages like the one you are currently browsing by expanding [#The Extractor Editor]] and using a simple point-and-click interface to pick out things of interest.

I'm not going to try to explain it here, but check out the page on extractors and play with it. I'll have to add though, that the term "extractor" is probably going to scare off some people, as it sounds too high-tech.

BTW, one more privacy issue. If you don't like people mashing up up your page, Intel will stop it, if you just ask.

My opinion? This could be a great way to expand the usefulness of the Internet, but it will require the "community" to contribute. If this gains critical mass, we could find Intel-created mashups all over the place - and that would be a good thing.

Source: By Tech Ex