Intel® Mash Maker FAQ

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Last Modified On :   September 21, 2007 12:28 AM PDT
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Intel® Mash Maker home

Frequently Asked Questions

Is this a supported Intel Product?

Does Intel claim exclusive ownership over mashups I upload?

Does Intel® Mash Maker export the data it produces in a form usable by other tools?

Does Intel® Mash Maker abuse other people's copyrighted material?

What are the privacy implications? What information does Intel® Mash Maker send to the server?

What about Internet Explorer and Safari?

What’s this about having to wait for an invite?

I’ve signed up for an invite. How long until I receive my login details?

How does Mash Maker know how a page is structured?

It’s not suggesting any mashups for this page. What’s up?

What if someone creates an abusive mashup?

Why are you using web extraction rather than high level APIs?

Don't Mash Maker users place unfair demands on web servers?

I don't like Mash Maker users mashing up my content. What should I do?

Is this a supported Intel Product?
No. This is a technology preview release of a research project. The intention of this release is to allow the community to see what we are doing and allow us to see how well it meets the needs of users. Since this is an early release of a research project, it is likely to contain bugs, and important features may be missing.

Does Intel claim exclusive ownership over mashups I upload?
No. However, in order to share your mashups with other users, we need you to give Intel the right to create derived works and share such works with others, and give up any right to charge Intel for doing this. To use the language of the EULA: You agree that Intel and its designees will be free to copy, modify, create derivative works, publicly display, disclose, distribute, license and sublicense through multiple tiers of distribution and licensees, incorporate and otherwise use the Communications, including derivative works thereto, for any and all commercial or non-commercial purposes. Note that the current license is simply a standard license used for preview releases of research projects, please do not read too much into it.

Does Intel® Mash Maker export the data it produces in a form usable by other tools?
We'd like to support this, but have not yet worked out a good way to do so, given that Mash Maker is implemented as a browser plugin. Watch this space...

Does Intel® Mash Maker abuse other people's copyrighted material?
We have no intention of using people's content in ways that they do not approve of. However, if we had to ask permission from everyone in advance, then that would be impractical, since we don't know what content our users might want to combine. If we see that some data source is being use d a lot, then we will contact the owners of that content to agree on how they would like it to be used. For content for which we do not yet have an agreement, we throttle the rate at our users extract data to ensure that such content is only used to a limited extent until we can work out how the content owner thinks it should be used.

Finally, we should point out that this is limited deployment of a research project, and that this issue is one of the reasons why we are inviting people in only gradually...

What are the privacy implications? What information does Intel® Mash Maker send to the server? Can Intel see which pages I’m browsing?
In order to protect your privacy, Intel® Mash Maker tells the server as little as possible. Intel® Mash Maker runs entirely inside your client browser, on your personal machine. Intel® Mash Maker communicates with the central server in the following ways:

  • When you first browse to a particular domain (e.g. bbc.co.uk, or craigslist.org) Mash Maker asks the central server to send it the information it has about that domain. Mash Maker only sends the name of the domain, and not the particular page you are browsing. When requesting this information, Mash Maker does not send your username, and we do not log incoming IP address. Thus Intel does not know, nor do we desire to know, either the pages, or the domains that you browse to.
  • When you click on a mashup suggestion, Mash Maker contacts the server, and informs it that you like this mashup. This is treated as a vote of support for this mashup, to encourage Mash Maker to suggest this mashup to others, and ask Mash Maker to suggest other mashups you might like based on the fact that you liked this mashup. The information that Mash Maker sends to the server does not include any content on the page, or even the URL, but does include the general category of the page (e.g. restaurant listing).
  • When you teach Mash Maker a new Mashup, this mashup is saved to the central server to be shared with the community. Any information you enter in the mashup description may be shared with other users.

Translation: Don’t worry. We have no interest in spying on you.

What about Internet Explorer and Safari?
Our intention is to eventually support all major browsers. Watch the Mash Maker blog for more news on this, and other developments.

What’s this about having to wait for an invite?
Mash Maker is a new service, and a lot of people are keen to use it. Rather than let everyone start using it at once, and risk overloading our servers and providing a disappointing experience, we are instead allowing users to join Mash Maker gradually. This gives us time to learn about how our servers adapt to the load, and iron out any issues that arise. If you enter your name and email address into the form below, we will email you as soon as we have space for you.

I’ve signed up for an invite. How long until I receive my login details?
That depends on how long ago you signed up, how many other users have signed up, and how close our servers currently are to their maximum capacity. Hopefully it will be soon, but any number we gave on this web page would be likely to be out of date.

How does Mash Maker know how a page is structured?
Mash Maker draws from the power of the community, using collaboratively maintained data extractors. If Mash Maker doesn’t understand how a page you are interested in is structured, or is misinterpreting the page, then you can teach MashMaker how the page works by expanding the “Data Tree” sidebar, and interactively editing the extractor definition that MashMaker has in its database.

It’s not suggesting any mashups for this page. What’s up?
This probably means that either:

  1. Nobody has told Mash Maker how to extract structure from this page. If you want to contribute this information then pop open the Mash Maker side-bar and tell us how this page works.
  2. MashMaker can’t think of any mashups that would apply to this data. If you can think of a good mashup, then use Mash Maker’s copy and paste buttons to paste in a page that you would like to see combined with this one.

What if someone creates an abusive mashup?
You are responsible for the content of all mashups you create. Intel may moderate mashups you create before they become visible to other users, however Intel does not in any way take responsibility for the content of mashups uploaded by users. If you find a mashup that you believe to be an abuse of the service, please inform us by right clicking on it and marking it as abuse. See the abuse policy for more details.

Why are you using web extraction rather than high level APIs?
It is our intention to eventually use high level web service APIs to talk to the web sites that our users use most frequently. The problem is that we don't know what web sites those will be, and requiring users to teach Mash Maker about new APIs would be very difficult - particularly as the APIs out there now are often unsuitable for our purposes.

We see extraction of data from html as being purely a gateway technology, to allow us to discover which services people like, and what kinds of data they want to combine. If a particular data source becomes very popular, then we will work with the content providers to provide their content to Mash Maker users through a more efficient high level API.

Don't Mash Maker users place unfair demands on web servers?
Access to data through web extractors is throttled to ensure that users do not place undue load on web servers. If we find that a particular web site is very popular with our users, then we will contact the owners of that website personally, to agree on how their content should be provided to Mash Maker users.

I don't like Mash Maker users mashing up my content. What should I do?
Send an email to Rob Ennals at robert.ennals@intel.com and we will place a block on your domain as soon as possible. We hope that most content providers will appreciate their content being made more accessible to our users.