Mash Feeds Syndicate Content to the Browser, Linking the Web to Your Site – said David Cowan in a recent post.. Wow, this sounds interesting!  Let’s see more:

When you install a mash feed on your site (we recommend you put it near the RSS icon, as shown on the right), MashLogic starts indexing the keywords in your RSS feed (it may currently take MashLogic 6 hours to build the complete index). Visitors to your site can now subscribe to your mash feed by clicking on the mash feed icon, which installs a mash in their Firefox or Flock browser. (IE is coming soon, and in the meantime IE users will not see the mash feed icon.) Even if your users never run an RSS reader, links to your site -- with your content in the callouts -- will follow them to semantically relevant pages on other sites. It's as if you had free rein to hyperlink the web as you want.

Very convincing. I did not take a lot of research to find raving reviews about Mashlogic, so I quickly made up my mind, created a Mash Feed that combines CloudAve and my personal blog, installed the button on my blog and downloaded the FireFox extension so I can enjoy the re-mashed world. I did not enjoy it very long.

I had to tweak several Mashlogic options and was not particularly impressed with the pop-up windows I saw, but that did not bother me too much: it’s a typical chicken-and-egg scenario, the more content is fed into Mashlogic the better the pop-up contents will become.   But all this time I was under the impression Mashlogic passively overlays the websites I visit with their content, without being too obtrusive.  Little did I know it actually writes into websites, whenever it gets a chance.

The eye-opener was a comment I left at one of Ben’s post right here @ CloudAve.  When I went back to re-edit it in html mode, I did not want to believe my eyes:

<p><strong>Fully featured</strong> to me also includes the richness of functionality within those modules, and is not necessarily a criteria for an <mashlogic title="MashLogic: Recent Headlines" class="mashlogic mashlink-recent-headlines" li-term="ERP system" mashbutton="c43071e2c4a1aff2f5a267e6cbf74299">ERP system</mashlogic>. <mashlogic title="MashLogic: TechCrunch, Company Info" class="mashlogic mashlink-techcrunch mashlink-company-info" li-term="Intacct" mashbutton="ymAHQYfVvAUvVL5bgVtc0A dd21bcb949ffc391b0eb5780b3542a99">Intacct</mashlogic> was originally a financial package, but as the extended to order entry, inventory ..etc, it is now taking the shape of an ERP-like offering - but I would think <mashlogic title="MashLogic: TechCrunch, Company Info" class="mashlogic mashlink-techcrunch mashlink-company-info" li-term="NetSuite" mashbutton="ymAHQYfVvAUvVL5bgVtc0A dd21bcb949ffc391b0eb5780b3542a99">NetSuite</mashlogic> is functionally richer in most of those areas, outside <mashlogic title="MashLogic: TechCrunch, Company Info" class="mashlogic mashlink-techcrunch mashlink-company-info" li-term="Intacct" mashbutton="ymAHQYfVvAUvVL5bgVtc0A dd21bcb949ffc391b0eb5780b3542a99">Intacct</mashlogic>'s core competency, accounting. And SAP is certainly functionally richer than <mashlogic title="MashLogic: TechCrunch, Company Info" class="mashlogic mashlink-techcrunch mashlink-company-info" li-term="NetSuite" mashbutton="ymAHQYfVvAUvVL5bgVtc0A dd21bcb949ffc391b0eb5780b3542a99">NetSuite</mashlogic>, yet they all can be labeled ERP.

A little hard to edit, isn’t it?  All this mashlogic crap is not a real-time overlay, it is hardcoded in my text! 

Utter nonsense – and the end of my Mashlogic experience.  Needless to say, I uninstalled the Firefox add-on immediately.   I still think it’s a great idea, and may be back to check it out some day – when they learn to “behave” and perhaps have more content.

On a somewhat related note: if you are interested in Mashups, integration, web-oriented architecture, and a lot more, you owe it to yourself to check out the Glue Conference (my intro here).  It’s a great conference at a bargain price – especially if you catch the early-bird discount till the end of the month.  I’ll be there – will you?

Update: It took less then two hours for the Mashlogic folks to see this post and acknowledge the error - see the comments below.  This is one of the reasons why I love startups: I don't recall a single instance when they would not respond almost immediately.  Customer focus always wins: it is how you covert a bitching ex-customer into a loyal user again.  Support is the New Marketing.