MashMaker
I’ve been pointed to this new project coming from Rob Ennals at Intel’s Research Labs in Berkeley, CA. Looks very cool indeed. Described as ‘Mashups for the Masses’, MashMaker sits on the Firefox toolbar and uses a set of web page scrapers to aggregate data from multiple sources on a single page, all ultimately controlled by the user. The user interface is slick, quite uncomplicated and rather well made. Scraping is also editable - you can add new sites using regexes and XPath - and this is managed as a community so contributions are available to other users too. The idea is that the more technically adept users can contribute the backend ‘glue’, which is then available for all users.
The videos on the site (the IDF one in particular) are worth watching. I’ve signed up for a beta test so I’ll hopefully be able to review more once I get my grubby hands on it.
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September 19th, 2007 at 2:35 pm
Also worth checking out is AlchemyPoint, a new end-user mashup platform released yesterday by Orchestr8. This must be the week for mashups!
September 25th, 2007 at 2:02 pm
Sven. Mashmaker is now up and running, and performing as per videos. Robs tells me that licenses are being issued. Right now it is best to use it while Americans are asleep, as the tidal wave of sign-ups and then downloads appears to have overwhelmed the server at poor little Intel. However, there is reported interest around the world. I will be fascinated to see what you think of Mash Maker. There is vast scope for creative new applications. Richard