Mozilla Wants To Weave A New Internet

In recent news, Mozilla has announced the launch of their new product: Weave. Mozilla wants Weave to be your one stop shop for your bookmarks, passwords and other data you'd like more control over online. Is the world ready for their dream of desktop to Internet fluidity?

I'm not sure this is the big step it's being made out to be right now. I think it is a step, and in the right direction, but it isn't the step - not yet.

For one thing, its scope is very limited. An advanced and far reaching idea with a limited implementation scope may end up hobbling itself right out of the gate. Take a look at their organizing principles to see what I mean:

Organizing Principles

We’ve set out some basic organizing principles to help frame the approach that we’re going to explore. We will:

* 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
(source: Mozilla Web Site)

If you want to create a new Internet interface that uses your desktop and the Internet together, you need a broader vision of what the interface will do. Right now, the Weave concept seems to focus on a small network of friends, family or coworkers that wish to share data online, and have a better place to keep and share bookmarks and other online data and tools.

The main drawback there is that other companies are doing that already, and with a much broader reach. They just haven't integrated it with your offline desktop in this manner yet. With Weave, the idea is that you control who sees your data online. Weave offers you a chance to consolidate your data, then build levels of access for friends, family, and third parties.

Weave offers privacy protection through encryption, and plans to open its API to developers right from the start. It is the first service of this kind offered by a browser company, but I'm not sure how important that is right now.

Many people are already using the web in this manner through technology like OpenId and online storage solutions, or aggregators like OnaSwarm and others. With so many solutions to this problem out there, Mozilla will need to really make Weave stand out to make it important to the average web user.