The web as platform: Weaving a new interface

I was planning to wind down blogging this weekend and do the blog re-design, etc, but the end-of-year stories keep coming in.

Earlier today Mozilla annouced Weave, a project within Mozilla Labs, earlier today.

As the figure suggests, the goal of Weave seems to make Firefox the hub of an increasingly online, increasingly social world. The mythical WebOS might not be right round the corner, but efforts like Weave are what are going to make it a reality. As our world goes increasingly online, as we struggle to address issues like privacy, etc, we will require more seamless experiences than we have now. Today’s web, while incredibly useful, is still very fragmented. We have multiple interfaces, multiple entry points, etc. What made the desktop successful was a single point of entry into applications. Is this project an example of providing an entry point to the web, one more organized than it is today.

The Weave blog post lists many of the ideas that have gone into the project. It still needs to be reconciled with all the other efforts going on to provide portable identity, etc, but at least as a concept, it is a much needed one, and points to Mozilla’s ability to think beyond the browser to render and access web pages.

There are still any number of open questions and challenges; standards, security, privacy, interoperability, and the likes, but it will be good to see how Weave evolves. It will be even more interesting to see how all the existing APIs, etc integrate with Weave. Mozilla has said that their goal is to just provide a framework and not develop applications. However, the possibilities of what this framework could be used for are quite fascinating. For example, could Weave be a solution for online identity that Tim O’Reilly proposed the other day.

In the end it points to an increasing dumbing down of the computer, where your environment only depends on logging into Firefox or other entry point into the web. Today, all instances of Firefox are different, and two people using Firefox on the same computer (assuming no multiple user logins) access the same Firefox. Weave, at its simplest, allows you to have access to the same Firefox everywhere. Perhaps the most telling statement came in response to a question on
the Weave use cases. In answer to “We’re talking about “synchronized web” here, yes?”, the response was (emphasis mine)

Our approach with this prototype does indeed use synchronization. Weave is a larger project than just our current prototype, though, and I think there are ways to accomplish some of our goals *without* using data synchronization. For example, given persistent high-bandwidth network connections, we could keep a local cache but make modifications directly on the cloud.

I think the moment we start making modifications in the cloud and start considering them the norm, then the web truly becomes our platform.

Technorati Tags: Mozilla, Weave, Web Services