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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Back in 2005 I was really excited about the web2.0 concepts, the web-based APIs, mashups, and all the new publishing tools that was later to be known by 2008 as "social-media".
Somebody wrote a while ago:

Google is an advertising company that builds popular services that command large audiences.

To which I add:

Apple is a leisure company that builds popular media-platforms that command large audiences of media-consumers.
I just got accepted to the most awesome workshop in the whole world, organized right here in Lisbon, the Codebits 2010, promoted by sapo.pt,

I'll be staying three days, in a row, in a big room packed with free wifi and free cable net access, unlimited free pizza, free cokes, free chocolate bars and
One of the biggest pain in the butt after an exciting conference/workshop/meeting is inputing all your fresh new contacts business cards info into your digital mail/phonebook. This is a problem. An unsolved one too.
Android is for tasks, life-hacks, body-hacks, and Chrome is for organized data, information.

At some point in the foreseeable future I expect to see an elegant merger where a next-gen browser will be the sole platform.
Hello all, it's been a while since my last post. These last months were spent mostly dedicated to finish my unfinished thesis - Ever heard of PhD comics? No? Well, it works better than Dilbert for me. Here's a nice one ...
The ipad is probably more expensive than the Chrome OS... but the browser experience is better, much better. I'm bending towards buying an iPad for my mom, so that she'll start using a computer, finally! She bought a laptop because she wanted to get in touch with her kids and friends through gmail.
My mom sure could use one of those Google PCs.

She's a veteran school teacher. She doesn't like using computers and hates the fact that she has to configure them for the wifi connection.
Update: if you want to check out what is cloud-computing in a secured sandboxed environment please follow this link.

When I first started this blog, I wanted to make a statement about my vision regarding the future of computing. I called this new thing the webtop. That was back in 2006.
Hi, I'm testing a javascript based syntax highlighter for this blog.
Google just launched earlier this week the new google mobile app with voice search. Now, we always went extatic in this blog, whenever a new web-based app with text-to-voice or voice-to-text features would come around.
Last week I went to codebits, the 24/3 hackers contest organized by the portal sapo.pt. And it was awesome! I had loads of fun, learned tons of stuff, met a bunch of new and interesting people, worked on my tech social network, etc, etc...
Last week I went to Shift.pt, a conference about new technologies, society and the web, organized and sponsored by Sapo.pt. There I've acquainted a bit more with Pedro Custódio and his team/friends, as well as a whole new bunch of very interesting people.
Here's an excerpt of a mail (addressee anonymacy kept) I wrote today that tells a long way about what are my expectations on shift, the web2.0 and society conference happening in Lisbon the 15th, 16th and 17th October 2008.

Dear Mr.
Wordle is an instant, genuine, original, art creating engine that leverages on the single most creative content originator on the whole galaxy: YOU.

Wordle is BEAUTIFUL because YOU are BEAUTIFUL.
One of the interesting things about web-wired mobile devices, is the ability to quickly geolocate the user, either by GPS, either by cell-tower antenna id, either by networked wifi ip.
Google just launched today their new open-source browser called Chrome. They're now adding a new element to the browser wars along with IE, Mozilla Firefox, Safari and Opera. This is a really smart move from Google towards building their Google OS.
Evernote is an interesting web service that stores all your notes, audio-notes, and snapshots and archives them for you. It then allows you to perform text search on them, even inside images.
In this post I will show you how to subscribe to twitter to receive free sms alerts on your cell phone. You can receive live soccer goals, weather forecasts, traffic alerts, the IST canteen menu, you name it ...

UPDATE 2008-08-27: DISCLOSURE 1: SMS ALERTS AREN'T FREE IN THE U.S.
Today was the WWDC, the famous Apple keynote by Steve Jobs at the Moscone center.
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