Mashups Fall Short of Mainstream
The Web 2.0 Expo is underway at San Francisco's Moscone Center this week, and mashups are one of the hottest topics. Mashups, if you don't know, are named after the music phenomenon where DJs create remixes that combine two or more original tracks -- think Jay-Z rapping over the Beatles. In the Web version, developers pull data from two or more sites and combine it in novel ways.
Confession time: I've never created a mashup. Apparently that makes me something of an anomaly in the Web 2.0 world. So I installed the Intel Mash Maker toolkit, which went into public beta to coincide with the Expo, in hopes of getting a jump-start. Unfortunately, I'm still not much further along -- which makes me wonder how long it will take before mashups are truly accessible to most business users.
Mash Maker is a set of plug-ins for either Internet Explorer or Firefox. You can download a beta version for either Windows or Mac OS after registering with the Mash Maker Web site. Once installed, it adds a toolbar and a new window pane that contain tools for analyzing, extracting, and repurposing data from Web sites.
The goal of the toolkit is to make it easy to combine data sources from different Web sites -- for example, linking local apartment listings on Craigslist to Google Maps. Unfortunately, although Intel has done an admirable job of making assembling mashups into a drag-and-drop affair, it definitely fails the "grandma test."
The tutorial videos on Intel's site start out simple enough, but it isn't long before you start hearing Web programming terms like "regular expressions." If you don't know what you're doing, it's easy to become lost in a bewildering array of menus and controls. Pointing and clicking only takes you so far with this tool; after that, you're going to need some experience with Web development to have any real success. In that sense, it's more like Dreamweaver than Microsoft Word.
As good as this may be, it just doesn't seem good enough -- not for grandma, and probably not for 90 percent of the casual business computer users out there. To be fair, this is still an early beta version of the software. But so far, Mash Maker doesn't give me much faith that mashups will break out of being a Web hobbyist's pastime to become a mainstream technology. For most of us, I suspect, the hype of mashups still far outpaces their capacity to help.
But maybe I'm wrong. Have you had success building mashups for your day-to-day computing tasks? I'd love to hear more about it. Sound off in the PC World Community Forums.
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