Mozilla Expands Its Universe With Weave

Mozilla is expanding its universe today, moving beyond desktop software products like Firefox (browser) and Thunderbird (email) and into cloud territory - web services.

The initiative, Weave, is a new project that will store user information - like bookmarks, passwords, history, preferences and customizations, and sync it to your Firefox account. Users can then access that information in the event of a hard drive failure, or if they are on a guest machine (say, at a cyber cafe).

An early version of Weave is available (you must be using the Firefox 3 beta) here. I have not been able to sign up for an account (the confirmation email won’t send).

The service clearly overlaps with initiatives by Google and Microsoft to store user information in the cloud (and Mac users can already sync some user information to the cloud via .Mac). And there will likely be a slew of casualties in the “web OS” space, as their main selling point is to store user settings and other data and make them portable for the cyber cafe crowd.

Based on the proposed architecture and use cases, Mozilla is not yet proposing to get heavily into the online storage space. Backing up non-browser content like photos and videos would compete directly with service providers who store this information online for customers (Flickr, YouTube, Photobucket, etc.). But by managing passwords to those services, Firefox is both supporting those service providers and encouraging users to not even bother keeping a desktop copy of content. Keep it all online, and use the browser, from any computer, to keep it all organized. And don’t forget, the social graph just may be hosted by Firefox, too.

Mozilla’s vision is clearly to become the operating system of the Internet, much as Windows is the OS for most desktops. Web applications already run through the browser, and now some of the user data will be stored on servers connected to the browser, too. While Google and Microsoft fire away at each other in the battle for users’ online life, they just may want to keep an eye on Mozilla, too. It’s a non-profit, but its brand is solid gold and they just might do an end around and grab all the users.

Google Profile

Google is rolling out a centralized profile system that will provide personalized information to each Google product you use. The unimaginatively named Google Profile will share information across all Google products, unifying often disparate Google systems that logins aside haven’t previously shared data with each other.

To quote Google:

A Google Profile is simply how you represent yourself on Google products — it lets you tell others a bit more about who you are and what you’re all about. You control what goes into your Google Profile, sharing as much (or as little) as you’d like.

Profiles include a nickname (real name to contacts only), occupation, location, links, photo and short description. An interesting twist is that each Google profile is public as well with Google suggesting that Google Profile pages “may be returned as results by Google.”

According to Google Operating System, Google profiles are now available in Shared Stuff, Google Maps, Google Reader and will be added to other web applications shortly.

Google Toolbar: Take your tools with you

with the latest version of Toolbar, you can save your settings online, and then get all of your bookmarks, custom buttons and AutoFill information from your different computers -- like when you're at home, or at work, or if you get a new computer for the holidays. It's kind of like carrying your Toolbar with you, but without the hassle of cardboard and string, and a lot more useful.

And, yes, there are some new reasons for you to carry your Toolbar with you, too.

You can accessorize with Google Gadgets: We first released custom buttons with search and feed functionality, and now we've added support for many Google Gadgets. In Toolbar, gadgets can even interact with the pages you're on, like with the Google Product Search gadget, you can just highlight the name of something you'd like to buy on any page and do a quick price comparison right there.

Google Notebook is built in: We realized that saving links as bookmarks to come back to is great, but not quite enough. So now you can collect text and images, too and put them into notebooks right from the Toolbar.

You'll get suggestions instead of error pages: If you mistype a URL or a page is down, now the Toolbar will give you that familiar "Did you mean" with alternatives, like when you do a Google search.



We still have the original Toolbar features, like automatic form filling, pop-up blocking and spelling correction, too, so give it a try and let us know what you think at http://toolbar.google.com/T5.

Tourist Remover

Tourist Remover is one tool in a suite of free online image editing tools in futureLAB's Snapmania. I used it recently on some pictures I took in XXXX to remove people and cars from the photos I snapped. The only thing you need to do is take 3-10 pictures of the subject (by hand, no tripod required), and then Tourist Remover averages the pictures and removes anything that only appears in one of the shots (such as moving people and cars). The tool will not remove anything that appears in two of the shots, such as a parked car. So when taking the pictures and when selecting the ones to use the tool with, make sure the items you want removed only appear in one shot. The rest of the imaging suite is pretty interesting and also does things like stitch panoramas together from several images. The interface takes a little getting used to, but basically once you learn the convention of dragging the images you want to edit onto to the tool you want to use, then it's all pretty easy.

iPhone Delivers: Bigger Browsing Share Than Windows Mobile

When Steve Jobs first announced the iPhone, he promised that it would revolutionize the mobile browsing experience. Roughly 1.4 million sales later it barely registers than more than a blip on global mobile phone sales charts, but its users a making their mark..

.09 percent may seem like an extremely small marketshare but when you consider that the iPhone has only been selling for 5 months and for most of that time was in one – albeit large – market (the U.S.), that share is amazing. Add another .01% for the iPod touch and Apple mobile platform is one out of every thousand pageviews across the Internet.

The WindowsCE platform - all of the Windows mobile platform devices put together - only managed 66% of iPhones market share. How many WinCE devices are out there? According to Gartner, MS and its partners shipped over three million Windows Mobile devices in Q1 2007. They've been selling WindowsCE devices since 1996 - over 10 years.


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