So, what's different? As of today, Cooliris will no longer launch into a full-screen 3D browser when activated. Instead, Cooliris will launch into a separate browser tab. This change was heavily requested by Cooliris users, a multi-tasking bunch of folks who wanted to be able to quickly switch back and forth between Cooliris's 3D web and all the other open tabs and applications running on their computers.

The Benefits of Cooliris in a Tab

However, as much as we loved soaring around through the visually stunning Cooliris application, one of its main drawbacks was the way it took over the desktop's screen upon launch. This sometimes even became an annoyance, like, for example, when an accidental click on the Cooliris button in Flickr had us sucked into the app's full screen mode when we really meant to go to the photo page.

Now all that's going to change because the new default setting is for Cooliris to launch in a new tab. Since all the supported browsers offer tabbed browsing, there was no issue in making this sort of adjustment. (Cooliris supports Safari, IE, and Firefox but tells us they're working on supporting more browsers in the future.) However, full screen mode is still possible, if that's your preference, via a button at the bottom of the screen.

Since Cooliris now launches in a tab, it's given a specific and unique URL. This, in turn, delivers more features to the application. Because it's just a URL, it can now be registered in your browser's history, can be saved as a browser bookmark, and can be shared with friends via social networking sites like Facebook or Twitter. Of course, anyone clicking on the URL will need Cooliris installed to see what you're sharing, but those that don't will be delivered to a landing page informing them of this.

A Couple of Other Changes

Although the change in Cooliris's launch behavior is the biggest news coming out of this update, there are a couple of other features worth noting as well. To begin, Cooliris now includes metadata for Flickr photos, just like how they had added metadata for YouTube videos, Facebook photos, and Amazon products during their last update. After Flickr, the team plans to keep adding in metadata for all their supported services over the course of future releases.

The metadata isn't just text information, either. A lot of it is hyperlinked. For instance, in the Flickr metadata, you can click on a username or date to be immediately taken to all the photos from that user or time frame. Also new today is a right-side column that lets you browse all the photosets from that user.

If you already have Cooliris installed, just update your extension. New users can download Cooliris from here. This update currently works on Firefox and IE only. A Safari version is coming soon.

Cooliris version 1.11: The 3D Wall in your browser tab from Cooliris on Vimeo.

Did our browser just get smarter?

In the past, Ubiquity worked by letting you enter in specialized commands called "verbs" into its interface which is launched by hitting "Ctrl + Space" on your keyboard (or "Option + Space" if you're on Mac). These verbs let you update, interact, and access various web services from Wikipedia to Twitter to YouTube and so much more. Some verbs are built into the extension, while other custom verbs can be added on as you choose. (For a big list of custom Ubiquity verbs, check out this post.)

Using Ubiquity gives you a geeky high as you type in commands like "twitter [message]" or "g [Search term]" to update your Twitter status or perform a Google search, respectively. However, interacting with the browser in this way probably appeals more to techies who probably still prefer the command line over that new-fangled GUI interface and have every keyboard shortcut memorized. It's harder to imagine mainstream users (yep, those same ones who don't even know what a browser is) using a UI such as this.

But with the recent update, that may change.

It's Not About Knowing Everything, It's About Knowing Where to Look

As people, we know we don't have all the answers, but that never holds us back. We launch Google, enter our question, and parse through the results provided until we find what we need. But ask an application to do something that it hasn't been programmed to understand, and it will just give you a blank look. (OK, probably an error message, but you get the idea).

That's why what Ubiquity is doing is so interesting. It can now accept and process input, even if it doesn't know the word. Maybe it's not really "thinking" as the title of this post implies - it's not all of a sudden an A.I. engine or anything - but it has just made a giant leap.

For example, explains Jono DiCarlo on behalf of the Ubiquity team, the software can now make network calls to help it figure out what you meant when you entered a word. "You can now type 'pasta' into Ubquity," he says. "Before, it wouldn't have known what to do with this input. But now, by making network calls to web services, it recognizes 'pasta' as a type of restaurant, and suggests the Yelp command to find pasta places near you."

It also appears that if you weren't looking for the restaurant called "pasta," you could use the other suggestions provided to perform the action you wanted instead. Maybe you wanted to "translate pasta," or read about pasta on Wikipedia...those links are only clicks away, although they didn't appear in the immediate results.

If Ubiquity can now accept any word into its interface, this expands the possibilities for use far beyond that of the geekified tech set because it means that, in theory, you would never have to memorize any of those commands at all. You could simply use the suggestions feature. Of course, a lot of this depends on how well Ubiquity can actually figure out what you meant based on the responses returned from the web services it queries. We'll obviously need to extensively test this feature before we can really determine that. Still, the potential is there.

Other Updates: Standardized Commands & More Languages

Assuming you do want to learn the commands, though, you'll be glad to know that they've now standardized those verbs to make them easier to learn. There are no more commands with hyphens, like the ugly "add-to-calendar," for example.

For non-English speakers, the new language options will be a plus. In Ubiquity 0.5, commands will come localized in Danish, English, and Japanese. Other languages will be added in the future, but if you can't wait, the introduction of a new parser localization tool will help you teach Ubiquity your language.

A Better Browser?

The innovations being delivered by Ubiquity are enough for this blogger to keep Firefox around - at least for now. Despite having made a nearly 100% switch to Google's Chrome (it's the speed!), news like this has me contemplating a switch back. Yet my Firefox install is currently weighed down with a number of can't-live-without-em (until I did, in Chrome) extensions that seem to slow it down. Perhaps it's time for a fresh install with only the one extension: Ubiquity. Because really, the way it's shaping up, it may be the only one you need. 

Ubiquity 0.5 can be downloaded directly from here.

You can also interact with the items being tracked via the Glue plugin which features a "like" button and another "2 Cents" button which lets you leave a comment about whatever it is you're viewing.

As with the previously released Firefox plugin, the Glue IE plugin also delivers the same type of interactions as you would expect: the connected conversations around everyday things, recommendations, and web-wide "top lists" that include the top items across the entire Glue network.

You can grab the Glue IE plugin from the main page of the Glue web site here. Note: the "Download" button still features the Firefox logo only at this time, but clicking the button reveals the IE download is available as well.

Disclosure: Alex Iskold (@alexiskold) is the founder of AdaptiveBlue, the company behind Glue, and occasional RWW feature writer.

Web Trends

Is YouTube the Next Google?

Kids no longer learn about the world by reading text. Like the television generation, they are absorbing the world through their visual sense. But there is a big difference. Television was programmed and inflexible. YouTube is completely micro-chunked and on demand. Kids can search for what they need anytime. This is different, and powerful.

True, the current model of YouTube is still raw and still skewed to entertainment. But imagine online video 5 years from now, geared to kids, where entertainment, games, education, travel -- everything for kids -- is mixed and delivered via searchable channels. This would be a big change on the Internet and in the world. Just as we no longer think twice about Googling, kids of the future will be consuming huge volumes of information via video.

Mobile Messaging Reaches Record-Breaking Numbers

Mobile messaging is experiencing a period of record growth, according to some figures released from VeriSign earlier this week. Looking at the numbers more closely, some interesting trends emerge. Those include the use of messaging for social and political change, marketing, such as that done by U.S. President-elect Barack Obama's mobile campaign, and the use of mobile messaging for charitable donations. Other sectors experiencing significant increases are the enterprise and financial institutions. In those two areas alone, mobile messaging has seen a 115% increase in only a year's time, and much of that is thanks to the financial industry's adoption of the medium for business to consumer communication.

Google Turning Search Into World's Biggest Wiki

Google put on a full court media push this week for a major change the company is making to its search experience - a new feature called Google Search Wiki will launch soon. The feature will allow logged-in users to change the order of search results and mark up search results pages with notes. Only their own results will be changed - unless they click a link to view all Search Wiki notes on a search's page.

Read the post for an explanation of what the feature will do and a reaction to the announcement from Ward Cunningham, the man who invented the wiki.

College Stops Giving Students New Email Accounts: Start Of New Trend?

Officials at Boston College have made what may be a momentous decision: they've stopped doling out new email accounts to incoming students. The officials realized that the students already had established digital identities by the time they entered college, so the new email addresses were just not being utilized. The college will offer forwarding services instead.

The A-Team

We like to report good news, not just because it makes us all feel good, but because when a company is doing something positive during a downturn, it indicates something pretty interesting about that company. That is why Jobwire reports on new hires when all the other news is about layoffs. In that same spirit, The A-Team will be a monthly wrap-up of all the Series A VC financing rounds in web technology. To close a Series A VC round these days, you have to be pretty special.

Read the full A-Team post for the Qualifying Rules.

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

A Word from Our Sponsors

We'd like to thank ReadWriteWeb's sponsors, without whom we couldn't bring you all these stories every week!

• VisualCV lets you stand out from the crowd when job-hunting.
• Mindmeister is an online mind mapping tool.
• WildApricot is Membership Management Software.
• Crowd Science gives you detailed visitor demographics.
• Glue enables you to connect with friends while browsing.
• Strands provides real-time recommendations of products.
• Direct Media Exchange is a solution for managing ad networks.
• Rackspace provides dedicated server hosting.
• Quintura is a visual-based search engine.
• Eurekster is a custom social search portal.
• MediaTemple provides hosting for RWW.
• SixApart provides our publishing software MT4.

RWW Jobwire

IRS Hires its First CTO

While the tech world eagerly waits to see who Barack Obama will appoint Chief Technology Officer of the United States, a similar appointment of more immediate impact to many people has just occurred. Terence Milholland began work this week as the first Chief Technology Officer in the history of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). He enters an IRS that the General Accounting Office said last week suffers from technology so outdated it leaves the agency with inadequate integrity, reliability and security for sensitive taxpayer information.

SUBSCRIBE TO READWRITEWEB'S JOBWIRE FOR THE LATEST NEWS ON JOB HIRES IN TECH

Web Products

10 Semantic Apps to Watch - One Year Later

In November 2007, we listed and reviewed 10 promising Semantic Web apps. A lot can happen in one year on the Internet, so we thought we'd check back in with each of the 10 products and see how they're progressing. What's changed over the past year and what are these companies working on now? The products are, in no particular order: Freebase, Powerset, Twine, AdaptiveBlue, Hakia, Talis, TrueKnowledge, TripIt, Calais (was ClearForest), Spock.

Later in the week we published a list of 10 more Semantic apps to watch.

Mozilla: One Billion Addons Served - Here Are Some of Our Favorites

Mozilla announced this week that it has served its 1 billionth addon download since they started keeping track of these downloads in 2005. Currently, Mozilla's users are downloading close to 1.5 million addons every day. Mozilla has cultivated one of the most active and interesting developer communities around its products and seeing numbers like these will surely give a lot of other developers an incentive to try their hands at developing new plugins for Firefox as well. In the post we list some of our favorite addons, as well as favorites of our community.

Amazon CloudFront: Outlook for CDN Is Cloudy (and That's Good)

Two months ago, Amazon - which has taken to sharing some of its massive computing power with mere mortals as a means of developing additional revenue streams - announced that they were developing a content-delivery network (CDN) to complement their existing Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) offering. This week, they unveiled the beta version of that service, named Amazon CloudFront. Boasting a now-familiar, pay-as-you-go pricing model, Amazon CloudFront promises to make CDN an affordable addition for any site looking to gain more efficient content delivery.

Boxee Raises $4 Million for Open-Source Media Center

These are clearly not the easiest times to secure financing for a startup, but Boxee, which makes an open-source media center application that works on Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, and the Apple TV, just announced a $4 million investment from Spark Capital and Union Square Ventures. Bijan Sabet from Spark and Fred Wilson from Union Square will join the Boxee board. Boxee, which is still in private beta testing, is a media center solution that allows you to play back content from third-party providers like Hulu, CBS, Comedy Central, or Last.fm through a very slick interface.

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

RWW Enterprise Channel

Report: Millennials Will Route Around IT Departments

According to a new report by Accenture, a large number of Millennials (those born between 1977 and 1997), expect their companies to accommodate their IT preferences, including their preferred computers and applications. More than a third of Millennials also indicated that they were dissatisfied with the technologies their employers currently provide.

Email us if you're interested in writing for ReadWriteWeb's Enterprise Channel.

SEE MORE ENTERPRISE COVERAGE IN OUR ENTERPRISE CHANNEL

That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

Mozilla has cultivated one of the most active and interesting developer communities around its products and seeing numbers like these will surely give a lot of other developers an incentive to try their hands at developing new plugins for Firefox as well.

Your Favorites

We asked our readers and Twitter followers about their favorite apps and, as expected, received a wide variety of answers. For web developers, Firebug was clearly a winner, though a lot of you also mentioned Greasemonkey, the bookmarking plugin de.licio.us, and DownloadHelper. Other favorites included Ubiquity, and FoxMarks, AdBlock Plus (though we hope you disable it on RWW and your other favorite websites), and Tab Mix Plus.

Our Favorites

Among the RWW staff, Sarah Perez listed the magazine-style RSS reader Feedly and the FFHolic Toolbar for FriendFeed users as some of her favorites.

Rick Turoczy is a big fan of the CoolIris plugin that allows you to browse pictures and videos in a very pretty 3D environment, though he also likes Iterasi, which allows you to take live snapshots of any web page. (Disclosure: Iterasi is one of Rick's consulting clients, but he assures as that he likes it so much that would use it anyway)

Richard MacManus likes StumbleUpon and the Google Toolbar.

Other favorites among the rest of the staff here included ColorfulTabs, Evernote's Web Clipper, and the Google Notebook plugin.

Also, all of us at RWW try to use our sponsors' products, so we are currently checking out AdaptiveBlue's Glue as well.

Did We Miss Something?

These are just some of the plugins we and our readers are using (and we surely missed quite a few). Did we miss your favorite? Feel free to let us know in the comments.

According to Mozilla's Justin Scott, 861 add-ons make up 95% of the total usage, while the other 5% are distributed among close to 5000 add-ons. 94% of the top add-ons are currently compatible with Firefox 3.0.

According to Mozilla's compatibility dashboard, as of today, only about 28% of the top 861 extensions are compatible with the latest builds of Firefox 3.1.

Getting to 95%

Currently, Mozilla's evangelism team is trying to reach out to all Firefox developers to make sure that everybody is ready by the time Firefox 3.1 is released. The release date for Firefox 3.1 is currently a moving target, but the second beta version should be available to the public by the end of this month, which might be followed by a third beta before the final version is released.

Some extensions, of course, are abandoned by their developers over time, so it might not be possible for Mozilla to get to the 95% mark for Firefox 3.1, but given the importance of Firefox and the extension ecosystem around it, it is good to see them reach out to developers proactively. For developers, getting ready for 3.1 should also be a priority, as Firefox users tend to update their browser very quickly after a new version is released.

For more information about the transition to Firefox 3.1 for extension developers, have a look at Mozilla's 'Add-on Compatability Center,' which will soon also feature additional tools for developers.

Installing The Fennec Extension

Shortly after Finke created the mobile-ready version of URL Fixer, the addons.mozilla.org web site was updated to include support for the Fennec browser. When Fennec users visit the site, it will recognize that they're coming from the mobile browser and will offer direct installation via an "Add to Fennec" button.

After a required browser restart, users will see the new extension available from the Fennec Add-ons Manager, where it's also possible to access preferences and disable or enable add-ons.

Mobile Add-Ons Are Fennec's Killer Feature

The idea of being able to use add-ons in a mobile browser is definitely going to be a huge selling point for the Fennec browser when it goes to launch as it will be the first to support third-party extensions. It opens up a world of possibilities that take advantage of the new platform, too. Is it possible we'll see add-ons that allow you to interact with your phone's functions itself like "click-to-all" or "copy to my contacts"? That may depend on the mobile phone itself and how locked down it is. Still, we imagine that developers will soon be thinking of all sorts of unique add-ons that work best in a mobilized environment.

What sort of add-ons would you want to see in a mobile browser? Let us know in the comments.

Screenshots courtesy of Madhava Enros and Mark Finkle

If that sounds familiar, you may need a shot of Juice, a new Firefox 3 add-in currently in public beta from Linkool Labs, that makes researching Web content as easy as click-and-drag.

Juice also adds the ability to capture images and video to a personal library - similar to some of the functionality found in Twine - enabling users to access those assets regardless of what they're doing in the main browser window.

How does Juice accomplish this? The Linkool team describes Juice as an "intelligent discovery engine," highlighting:

This engine, comprised of a natural language processing system and a dictionary management system, helps to evolve the semantic web by connecting keywords with the most relevant, rich content from third-party web services.

Of course, the mention of the "Semantic Web" caught our attention. It's no secret that we here at ReadWriteWeb are fans of the Semantic Web, but unfortunately, we often find the concept reduced to a buzzword that - once implemented in a product - has a hard time living up to the hype.

Juice seems to avoid some of the more traditional stumbling blocks of Semantic apps by taking a very top-down approach focused on a distinct data set. Confining the activity to user-selected terms, Juice manages to sidestep issues that have plagued apps which attempt to consume and use much larger sets of information. Smaller chunks of data allow Juice to return more compelling results.

Room for Improvement

But for all its ingenuity and ease-of-use, Juice isn't without its shortcomings.

As mentioned, it's currently only available on Firefox 3, meaning users of other popular browsers will have to continue their current searching rigamarole or convert to Firefox. That, and it's part and parcel of the browser on which you install it. There doesn't seem to be any synching with a Web account to allow you to use your data on different machines.

When it comes to where you search for information, there doesn't seem to be any way of customizing the resources that Juice chooses to search. So if you prefer IceRocket or Ask to Google Blogsearch, you're out of luck.

If you're into customizing your look and feel, Juice doesn't appear to have any options there, either. The information pane always appears on the right of the browser. I couldn't find any way to move it to the bottom, where I would prefer to have it.

Based on what Juice delivers, none of those are showstoppers, especially given that Juice is currently in beta. Those shortcomings aren't going to prevent many users from taking it for a spin and likely integrating it into their browsing experience.

The simplicity of use is definitely there. As is the compelling depth of research that occurs with a simple click-and-drag. Combine that functionality with Juice's ability to let users work and research without disrupting their workflow, and Juice appears to be a worthwhile addition for any Firefox 3 user.

When managing your reading list through the bookmarklet, you now have more options as well. You can view your list as either "normal" or "condensed," select how many items to show per page, open the list in the sidebar, and enable or disable various context menus and additional toolbar buttons.

However, the best feature to come to your reading list is the ability to sort it by PostRank. This functionality, formerly called AideRSS, is something we've been big fans of here at RWW for some time. With PostRank enabled, your reading list is intelligently filtered by popularity. Posts are scored in several ways, including number of comments it received, number of times it's been tagged in Del.icio.us, number of diggs, and how many inbound links it has received. So now, you can read your list in order of importance, an especially useful feature for those suffering from information overload.

Other improvements like updated privacy controls and tweaks to existing features round out this latest release, making Read It Later a great addition to your browser whether that's Firefox or IE. Now all we need is an iPhone bookmarklet and we'll be all set.

What's Glue?

Glue is a new browser plugin from Adaptive Blue. It uses semantic technology to connect you to your friends around things like books, music, movies, stars, artists, stocks, wine, restaurants, and more. The plugin places a bar - not a toolbar, just a bar - at the top of your browser window when you visit certain popular web sites like Amazon, Yahoo! Finance, Wine.com, IMDB, Wikipedia, Citysearch, Last.fm, and many others.

As you read about the album, movie, book, or whatever else it is that you're viewing at the time, you'll have a toolbar at the top of the page where you can see which of your friends had visited the same page, if they liked it, and if they left a comment.

Glue Is Not Co-browsing

Glue is not a co-browsing plugin like Me.dium nor does it try to socialize the entire web surfing experience like Socialbrowse (our coverage). Also, unlike Headup, another semantic browser plugin we covered recently, Glue doesn't bother you with pop-up messages as you surf. Glue simply provides a social element to web pages in context - there's no destination site to join and your social graph doesn't need to be re-created in order to use it.

How It Works

In order to tap into your network of friends, Glue uses APIs from popular social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and FriendFeed to import your friends. You can choose to import one or all of those friend lists into the plugin.

To participate in the Glue network, all you do is continue browsing the web normally. When you visit a supported site, the Glue friend bar appears. If you choose, you can view what your friends say about the item on the page, or you can ignore the bar and continue on your way. However, your visit is recorded and when one of your friends visits that same page, they can see that you've been there recently, though not the exact date or time your visit occurred. This information is only stored for the last 20 things you've visited on the web.

While surfing, if you want to share your thoughts about the item you're viewing, you can optionally use the Glue "like" button and/or the "2 cents" button which lets you add a quick thought about item. You can also click on the bar to see the profiles of your friends, other recent Glue users, and you can explore their interests even further by clicking into their profiles, which display in a pop-up box that appears when you click their avatar. You can also optionally click on "Actions" to explore the item you're viewing on other Glue-supported sites.

Making The Social Web Relevant

By providing this social experience in context, Glue can actually be more useful to you than simply joining isolated social networks surrounding your interests where your data and that of your friends is trapped inside the network's walls. It may also have some appeal over a lifestreaming service like FriendFeed, because you don't have to happen across the information - it's there when you're actively interested in something and have sought it out on the web.

In the official version coming soon, the company is also soon going to provide a method for any web publisher to "Glue-enable" their site by simply adding AB Meta to their sites, by inserting three lines of code in the header of a page.

Glue is the next generation of the Adaptive Blue plugin, a tool that currently has around 350,000 active users. Current Adaptive Blue users will find their plugin updated to Glue through the standard Firefox plugin update process. For everyone else, you can download the plugin here.

Although at the present time Glue is available as a Firefox plugin only, an IE version is in the works and an iPhone plugin will arrive in a few weeks.

Disclosure: AdaptiveBlue's CEO, Alex Iskold, is a feature writer for RWW.]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/put_the_social_web_in_context_with_glue.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/put_the_social_web_in_context_with_glue.php Product Reviews Tue, 28 Oct 2008 12:00:00 -0800 Sarah Perez On Tuesday, Flock revealed the new version of their social browser, Flock 2.0. At the time, the company made a point to mention that most Firefox extensions would work in their browser, too, including one of our favorites, Greasemonkey. However, yesterday, Flock Community Ambassador Evan Hamilton sent out an email to all Flock developers about some changes the company had decided to make. The email made it clear that Flock had not just decided to support Firefox add-ons, they were killing all the Flock-specific add-ons, too.

According to Evan's email:

Extensions.flock.com has had a bumpy history. There's a fundamental issue here: there are very few Flock-specific extensions, and a great many Firefox extensions that are already hosted on addons.mozilla.org. The architecture behind extensions.flock.com is not mature, and we have historically been unable to devote valuable developer resources to this.  It's unrealistic (and doesn't make a lot of sense) to try to create our own system on the level of addons.mozilla.org until we have more Flock-specific extensions. Our admiration for the work Mozilla has done extends to addons.mozilla.org...AMO really is the best experience for getting extensions. With that in mind, we have cut the fat that is our unwieldy extensions system.

Sorry Developers, We Took Down Your Flock Extensions

The email goes on to inform the developers that the company had removed all the extensions from the site that are not Flock-specific - that is, any extensions that take advantage of some unique feature within the Flock browser itself. In addition, the Drupal back-end from extensions.flock.com has been removed which means no more comments or ratings on posts and no more automatic submission system. Any developer wanting to submit an extension going forward will need to email extension-submission@flock.com instead.

For visitors to the Flock web site, the new extensions page will point them directly to addons.mozilla.org.

According to Flock, the changes will allow the company to move forward focusing only on Flock-specific extensions, and finally, themes. As we noted earlier, customization is an important aspect to the browser experience. Something as simple as being able to skin Flock could make the transition easier for those making the switch.

Flock's Real Message: We're Just A Version Of Firefox

We think Flock's decision to separate their extensions from Firefox's extensions is a good one. Although their email promoted the idea that this just freed up time for Flock to focus on other aspects of their project, that's probably not the whole story here.

Flock wants to appeal to the social media crowd, a group that typically includes a large number of Firefox users. But in the past, Flock had set themselves too far apart from the Firefox community and gave off the impression they were really an alternative browser. Now that Flock has upgraded to the Firefox 3 codebase and lets you use nearly all the Firefox extensions, the message they're sending is that they aren't that different after all, they're just a version of Firefox 3 with nifty social features. In other words, you get the best of both worlds: Firefox 3 and social media integration.

Will this change in direction work and help Flock pick up some steam? It's possible. If you can move to a new browser which works like your old one and take all your extensions with you, the experience is much less painful. Now all they need is some sort of extension import wizard and we'll be all set.

The contest was meant to showcase extensions that made use of the new capabilities Mozilla introduced in Firefox 3 and managed to combine this with excellent usability and the use of open standards.

Pencil, one of the three Grand Prize winners, is an easy to use tool for GUI prototyping and diagramming, which makes uses of Firefox's SVG support for rendering and scripting. It's obviously not the most exciting of applications, but it works as advertised and is a great tool for anybody who needs to draw up a GUI prototype quickly.

The second Grand Prize winner, Tagmarks, adds a set of icons to your URL bar that allows you to easily add tags to your bookmarks or to quickly bookmark and tag a page at the same time. Out of all the plugins in the contest, this one is probably the most immediately useful. Adding tags to a bookmark can be useful, but few people make use of this capability. Tagmarks also allows you to safe your links to Delicious in addition to your local bookmarks.

The third Grand Prize winner is also a tagging extension: HandyTag. HandyTag suggests tags for your bookmarks based on the tags you have already used, tags given by Delicious users, and tags HandyTag's keyword extractor suggests.

Fire.fm

Fire.fm, the best new music add-on, gives you easy access to your stations on our favorite streaming music site, Last.fm. Fire.fm works exactly as advertised and provides a nice way to play music through Last.fm without having to keep a browser window open. You can also easily access your favorite stations by just typing in a few letters into the URL bar.

Now, in addition to the "full featured" option on Cooliris's Developer page, there's a new "Quick and Simple" option that promises to work on most sites. All you have to do is enter in your URL, and, after some tests are performed, you're provided with an XML file and some embed code to add to your site. The entire process is said to take about ten minutes, but in our testing, it was even quicker than that.

Another new feature in Cooliris is a new sharing option which lets you drag and drop media from the Wall to share with friends. Right now, this feature supports email only, but in the future, sharing via Facebook may become available.

If you're looking for content to view with Cooliris, you can visit Getty Images, the world's largest source of stock photos, which recently became Cooliris-enabled. You can also just launch the plugin and use its "Discovery" option, which loads a list of channels for you to choose from, including one that currently offers photos and videos from the Olympic Games in Beijing.

You may remember a project called Enso, a software program developed by Humanized - the same folks who brought you Songza. The program is an application launcher which provides you with a different way to navigate and interact with your computer through the use of keyboard shortcuts and typed commands. As we noted before, Enso appears to have been abandoned by the developers who created it since they were snatched up to work at Mozilla. However, the software itself was open-sourced. But now, those same developers are using the concepts brought forth by Enso to create a whole new UI for Firefox called Ubiquity.

The Ubiquity project aims to solve problems involving today's web applications and how we interact with them. Atul Varma describes this on his blog:

Web applications, much the same as desktop applications, are a bit like isolated cities: it's difficult for an end-user to arbitrarily share data and functionality between them. This is alleviated to some extent by creations like Firefox Add-ons that add toolbars or sidebars to Firefox's UI, Bookmarklets, and Greasemonkey, but while all of these solutions are powerful, each comes with its own set of problems. The buttons and bars of many Firefox add-ons don't scale well because of the valuable screen real-estate they consume; Bookmarklets are restricted in scope because they only have the access privileges of the website they're running on; and Greasemonkey doesn't prescribe any kind of interaction model, which makes it difficult to reuse the functionality of a script in a context other than the ones it was expressly designed for.

To solve these problems, they're developing Ubiquity which will let you apply textual commands (called "verbs") to whatever you're looking at on your screen.

As an example, say you found a typo on a friend's blog. Instead of copying and pasting the sentence into an email, you could use the Ubiquity UI to highlight the problem text then launch Gmail's compose screen with some default information already filled in (like "From the page Aza's Thoughts:) to introduce your email.

Atul also notes that the Ubiquity interface is currently activated via hotkeys, but that's just for the time being. Their ultimate goal is to have the program more deeply integrated with Firefox so it could be accessed from UIs that already exist - like contextual menus or the AwesomeBar.

To keep tabs on the status of the Ubiquity project or to download the code, you can visit their project page here.

VC Fred Wilson asked recently on his blog if there is a business in browser add-ons? I have a vested interest, since my company is in the add-on business. Adding a bit of functionality to your browser can be fun and customization makes software more personal, yet there are issues such as privacy, performance, and the inability of mainstream consumers to manage add-ons.

The browser is a web battlefield. Microsoft will do everything in its power to keep on top of the browser game, but it's been losing ground to Mozilla's Firefox - where security and add-ons are a differentiating factor. Firefox is not only the early adopter browser, but it is also being marketed as the people's browser.

Add-ons help Mozilla foster its vibrant community. Redmond recognized this and a year ago started a major push for browser add-ons. Both major browser makers now focus on add-ons and this support offers the opportunity for startups to reach millions.

Can this result in a business built around add-ons? In this post we take a detailed look.

Browser as a Platform

Every major browser offers a plug-ins infrastructure. Mozilla and Opera made add-ons fundamental to their strategy, while Microsoft has recently started to focus on add-ons. These are the reasons why it's important for the browsers to support this:

1. Keep the core browser light to avoid feature creep.
2. Foster a community of innovators and entrepreneurs, helping to evolve and define the next generation browsing experience.
3. Enable users to customize and personalize the browser.

There's another major driving force: webification of the desktop. Some 2 years ago one of my first articles discussed the convergence of the desktop and the web. Desktop applications have become more web-aware and in a sense every app is now a web app. Why not make such applications browser based?

Browser add-ons are easier to deliver than desktop applications. Every major browser player becomes a sought-after distribution point. The Browser War also becomes the Desktop War.

Users: It's all about utility

Browser makers know what's at stake. Modern users seek convenience and utility; they're looking for contextual software that helps them get things done. And they don't want to pay for it.

Because the add-ons are compact and update mostly automatically for consumers, they feel very different compared to heavy desktop apps, where people had to manage large chunks of software on Windows machines. These days users do one-click installs of the recommended, popular and new-add ons from the gallery. The experience is the same regardless of your operating system and the add-ons update automatically. In a way it's what Sun has been doing with Java, except there is no virtual machine to download. The Browser is the Virtual Machine.

Businesses: It's all about numbers

In evaluating business opportunity, we need to consider scale and monetization. Popular Firefox add-ons enjoy tens and some even hundreds of thousands of downloads a week. Firefox itself had a record number of downloads recently and it's pushing add-on downloads along with it. Since Microsoft has been focused on add-ons lately as well, popular add-ons are getting great exposure via the IE community as well. Browsers have opened a massive distribution channel for application delivery and companies are starting to leverage it.

Not all add-ons will do well. The power law argument applies. A relatively small number of add-ons will dominate, and most will have just a few hundred users.

What is the shape of this power law curve? Just how many add-ons can be successful businesses? And how many add-ons can one user have? It's difficult to imagine more than 10 per user.

Only great add-ons will stay permanently and will have a chance of being a business. The same is true about every online/software business: iPhone apps, Facebook apps, web services and desktop applications.

The add-ons of today have a much clearer shot at the user base compared to the desktop applications of the 90s. Everybody uses a browser so the target market is massive.

How will add-ons be monetized?

Assuming that an add-on gains users and becomes popular, how will it be monetized? Four ways come to mind: Charge the users; sell advertising; use an affiliate model; be a data/service provider.

Charging users is not really an option. We've written about the danger of free, but this is just the state of today's market, where consumers don't pay for software. It would be difficult to fathom the model where consumers would willingly pay for premium features. Flickr manages to do that and 37signals has managed to build a business around paid premium services, but these are exceptions.

Advertising is the de facto choice to make money on the web, but for add-ons this is not a natural. Users are okay with banner and link ads in pages, but if browsers start to advertise on top, that could irritate. An advertising model would need to be delivered in a way that fits the functionality of the add-on.

An affiliate model seems more feasible. Many add-ons focus on enhancing shopping; having smart contextual product experience wired into the browser makes consumers happy. This model is fine for add-ons that focus on books, music, movies, travel, and other verticals. The affiliate game is all about scale, and being part of the browser gives the businesses presence around the web.

The last model is essentially a data play. As users browse the web, they reveal their preferences and habits. Individual, group and aggregate information about user's attention can fuel services, from personalized alerts and improved search to web-wide popularity and recommendation engines. The issue here is privacy; sites and ISP providers track people, but people hate being tracked.

In order for the data businesses to thrive, they need to have a clear stand on information ownership. One strategy is to make personal information completely private: i.e., put the user in control. The aggregate and group information can still be used for business purposes, but not traceable back to individuals. There is opportunity to enable users to leverage personal information on their terms. Add-ons can enable pipe businesses that faciliate connection between the users and other web services.

All these opportunities are not well understood today, since the promise of the Attention Economy has never really been fulfilled.

Conclusion

Browser add-ons are increasingly interesting ways to reach consumers. Since the browser is the most used application on the desktop and major browsers are platforms, businesses are looking for opportunities to reach consumers through this new channel. Better than desktop applications, browser add-ons are light and update automatically.

As with any vertical business, only a few add-ons can become real businesses. The competition is tough and the business models have not been mapped out that well. Yet if there's a shot at reaching users via a download, browser add-ons seem to be it.

What is the future of browser add-ons? Do you think business will be built around them? What business models will we be seeing around add-ons?