Orchestr8 unveils its powerful mashup platform: AlchemyPoint

There was this cool screencast I posted not so long ago, from Elliot Turner, the founder of Orchestr8, who'd show this amazing live mashup tool from a command line bar on a firefox browser that he called AlchemyPoint.
Today, AlchemyPoint is released as a pre-beta technology preview. Since I'm pretty addicted to cool stuff happening on the web, I decided to take AlchemyPoint for a spin.



INSTALLING
In order to download and install the software, you need to sign up first. Soon, you should get an email granting you access to the download page. The whole file is around 10MB and it takes about 1 minute to install. This will setup the AlchemyPoint server that'll run as service in the background and should take up about 30 MB of your memory (hmm, another bloating plugin for the already infamously-bloated FF). The server is the engine that renders the mashed web-pages.
Although the rendering engine is theoretically cross-browser, the only plugin available so far is Firefox's 2.0. This means that Opera lovers, such as myself, will have to wait (oh...), but at least there's hope (yay!). Once you launch Firefox, the plugin installs automagically. Cool, it took me less than 2 minutes to install it on my winXp laptop!


THE FIRST IMPRESSION
Woa, look at all these actions ... On my iGoogle startpage I had around 27 to 35 suggestions that enabled me to perform actions on the currently viewed page. (Post page to Digg, Furl, Del.icio.us, Newsvine, ..., Check the back links ..., Check the page ranking ... Submit the RSS feed to google reader, netvibes ...).
The suggestions are context dependent. From page to page, new and relevant suggestions are proposed and deprecated suggestions are omitted.
So far this is nothing extraordinary for people who use bookmarklets intensively like myself and already have bookmarks on their personal toolbar that performs all the essential actions on a page. I even use nicknames, or keywords, when I want to quickly summon them from the address bar.
The plugin's merit so far, is to aggregate all major known bookmarklet into a friendly context-aware drop-down menu. This will enrich my experience of submitting web-pages to third-party services (social bookmarkers, feeds aggregators, back-links search, page ranking).


THE BETTER IMPRESSION
So far we saw how AlchemyPoint would easily allow to interact the current page with other pages. Nothing a mashup rendering engine'd be required to run in the background for. But then, as we activate the "Customize this page" button, we finally turn on the mashup engine for some real action. Did you ever wanted to edit a web-page just like you would edit a word document? I still remember the days when I felt that editing web-pages in a WYSIWYG fashion should be a given thing. Boy was I wrong! Anyway, AlchemyPoint did what nobody else dared to: it turned web-pages into easily editable documents with "copy, cut'n paste" features that allows to perform simple mashups of web-pages between one another. But more is still to come ...


THE GREATER IMPRESSION
Not only AlchemyPoint turns web-pages into editable documents, but it also allows to perform tasks only available in the web context such as creating RSS feeds, extracting semantic data whenever and wherever it is available (XML, url, search queries), translating snippets or the whole text of the page etc, etc ...
These transformations to the web-pages are stored in the "enabled" stack. Whenever need be, one can disable them by passing them to the "disable" stack. Furthermore the "copy/select/extract" actions are stacked in a clipboard called "extractions". That way, inserting retrieved content (e.g. a search form) is easily performed. Trully awesome!


TO SUM UP
AlchemyPoint turns the web-browser into a web-processor, seamlessly. Web pages can finally be edited without any programming or any knowledge of html. It's so far, and by far, the ultimate client-sided mashup platform. Still, I only had little time to fiddle around with it. Anyway, I can't possibly imagine the implications of such a tool in the hand of creative people. When will a killer app arise from this tool?

When we think of all these new mashup tools such as Yahoo!Pipes, Dapper, Feed43, Teqlo, Strata and AlchemyPoint, and we pile them all up, a whole lot of emergent stuff starts to glitter, and the future of the web seems well underway for some interesting evolution.
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