Mozilla Labs introduced Weaver, which is supposed to enrich the Firefox experience by allowing more control to the users over personal information and data. The Mozilla Labs team has set a list of principles around which the Weave project is to develop:

• 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

Basically, your browser’s meta data - bookmarks, history and more - is pushed into a data cloud (something that’s been proposed as the future of Internet and application development), and then this data is available anywhere the user is online to people the user allows to have access to this data. The goal is not to build a robust framework with many capabilities built in, but to create a development environment that would allow other developers to extend and build applications using an API.

I don’t think sharing my meta data is something that I would like to get into too easily. There are plenty of ways this data can be misused, although the Mozilla Team have stated this is just a basic prototype, with plenty of development still to come. Encryption is going to be required by default, so security is the first thing that’s going to be addressed.

Weaver is available for download as a basic prototype and works with Firefox 3.0b2pre or greater.

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