Optaros Labs

You Centric Browsing and the Assembled Web

In this video from Carsonified‘s Future of Web Apps (FOWA) London conference, Mozilla Labs‘ Aza Raskin describes what he calls “You Centric Browsing“:

You-Centric: The Future of Browsing from Carsonified on Vimeo.

(The last section becomes mostly demo of Ubiquity, which you may have seen elsewhere but is still quite cool). The core aspects of You-Centric browsing include:

1. Portable Identity (in the browser)
2. Social Graph (in the browser)
3. Integration (other stuff from the desktop or computer in the browser)

It’s all about, in Raskin’s words, “Making the web revolve around you,” though cynics might note that the “you” really means “your browser.”

What I love about Mozilla Labs approach, though, is how it leverages open standards and open source. In building identity into the browser, for example, Mozilla did not try to create a new source of lock in for Firefox, but implemented OpenID – meaning users can get Identity in the browser but also retain the ability to bring that identity out of the browser, or to another browser if they so choose.

Similarly, though I don’t know anything about their specific implementation, the notion of bringing the social graph (who my friends are and how I typically contact them, in Raskin’s example) doesn’t require fixing that graph to Firefox. Instead, the browser can parse the XFN/FOAF used by sites like Twitter, and the portable contacts API provided by Plaxo, Gmail, and others. This information can be accessed and used by the browser without the browser becoming the one and only source for that information.

One of my favorite Raskin lines is to describe this as “the browser as my insanely smart butler” – gathering, arranging, and making useful information and services from throughout the web. (My other favorite: “Any magic which is sufficiently dumb becomes indistinguishable from technology”).

What’s all of this got to do with the Assembled Web?

I see it as a browser-focused take on the shift toward consumer control. Increasing the power of the browser in the user<->browser<->site chain of interfaces (the user doesn’t hit the site or web application in an unmediated form but through a browser) is certainly a part of the same shift in the direction of a web in which the consumer decides when, where, and how to interact with the content and services provided by vendors.

Tags: Assembled Web, Aza Raskin, Control, firefox, Mozilla, Mozilla Labs, OpenID, Portable Identity, Social Graph, User Centric, You Centric

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 27th, 2009 at 9:25 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.