It seems that as the Web continues to evolve and as more of our lives moves online, we could do more to broker even richer online experiences.
We've been thinking about this a lot lately. And, in particular, how the blending of the desktop and the Web -- through deeper integration of the browser with online services -- could further enhance the user experience, increase user control over personal information, and provide new opportunities for developers to build innovative online experiences.
For example, it could provide the ability for users to synchronize profile data between computers (with the ability to grant fine grained access rights to third-parties), or provide new tools for interacting with all of the various social networks, building on earlier experiments like The Coop and Joey.
And even though these sorts of things are possible today with existing tools, it requires considerable bespoke development and implementation of things (e.g. network operations, data synchronization, encryption, messaging, identity management, etc.) that should be common and provided by the platform.
And perhaps more importantly, without designed integration points in the browser or on the desktop, and with no guidelines or structure, user experience across the whole of the system suffers.
So, just like we have enabled massive innovation by making Firefox open on many levels, what if we did the same with services by developing an open extensible framework?
And while we've just started to explore this idea, we do have some proposed organizing principles. We would:
- provide a basic set of optional Mozilla-hosted online services
- ensure that it is easy for people to set up their own services with freely available open standards-based tools
- provide users with the ability to fully control and customize their online experience, including whether and how their data should be shared with their family, their friends, and third-parties
- respect individual privacy (e.g. client-side encryption by default with the ability to delegate access rights)
- leverage existing open standards and propose new ones as needed
- build a extensible architecture like Firefox
Early thoughts and feedback are most welcome, and especially from those interested in participating in the further development of this concept.
More detailed discussion and posts to follow.
