This commitment to identity integration, coupled with Chrome's move to cloud-based bookmarking, point to the growth of the borderless social web experience - an experience that has been a long time coming. For years we've asked for social network portability and the freedom to manage our own online relationships. With this rising trend towards browser-based service integration and cloud-based data storage, we're one step closer to realizing that dream.

With Weave, Mozilla Labs currently offers a very similar feature, though Weave hasn't made it into the default install of Firefox yet. In the past, Google also offered a synchronization plugin for Firefox, but the company discontinued this service in December 2008.

Link to Chrome OS?

Of course, we can't help but wonder if this work isn't also being done in preparation for the upcoming release of the Google Chrome OS. A lot of the work to get Chrome to sync between different instances is being done at the backend. If Google could get its netbook OS to seamlessly sync with applications on the desktop, then that would be yet another selling point for the Chrome OS.

Privacy?

Chances are that you are already storing your search history on Google's servers. With Chrome's synchronization feature, however, you would also store a complete record of all of your comings and going on other parts of the Internet on Google's servers. Mozilla Weave encrypts your data before it is synced with Mozilla's servers. In today's announcement, the Chrome team did not talk about encryption, though we would be surprised if Google didn't implement client-side encryption as well.

For some users, though, giving even more information to Google - even if it is encrypted - may turn out to be a deal breaker.

Get the Dev Channel Release (if you dare)

For now, only users who have installed Chrome's developer version and are subscribed to the Dev channel will see these new features. The Chrome Dev channel is the most frequently updated, cutting-edge version of Chrome, but these version are also far less stable than those in the more mainstream Beta and Stable channels. If you would like to switch to the Dev channel, instructions for installing this version of Chrome can be found here.

The new login method lets users log in to an OpenID supporting site or a traditional username/password site with one or zero clicks. It's a password manager, essentially, but it looks like an especially smooth one from one of the most trusted vendors online. And it syncs with the cloud so you could log in to your browser and then your favorite sites from any computer. It looks real nice.

This is just one more chapter in a much larger story - but look how easy this makes OpenID to use! If you're a user of password management software, we'd love to hear how this interface appears compared to your existing tools. I use Sxipper, which does a good job of managing multiple accounts and will fill out whole forms but has an interface that can be pretty obnoxious sometimes. I would miss the form-filler, though, if I left it for this new Weave functionality.

User credentials are just one little form of data that Weave could help us carry from site to site to site. The browser as an instrument of data portability? Bring it on!

Dan Mills, from Mozilla, offers in depth discussion about the approach in his official blog post and the comments there are good. The answer to the big question - "when can I get this?" Soon, Mills says.

Not too long ago, Google announced that it was going to stop the development of its Browser Sync project. Browser Sync automatically synchronized bookmarks between different computers. Mozilla just announced a new version of its own bookmarks synchronization product, Weave, which was first announced last December as a Mozilla Labs product. Its first version, while already interesting, wasn't quite up to par with Google's offering. With this latest version, Mozilla aims to fill the gaps left by the demise of Browser Sync - at least for Firefox 3 users.

Going Beyond Bookmarks

Besides just synchronizing bookmarks, Weave also saves cookies, passwords, form data, tabs, and the browsing history. These can be turned on and off selectively, though by default, they are all turned on. In the future, Weave will also start synchronizing themes, plugins, and microformats.

One noteworthy difference between Browser Sync and Weave is that Weave, at least in its current implementation, does not work in real-time. Weave will automatically schedule when to synchronize bookmarks or users can initiate the process themselves.

Mozilla has also implemented an initial framework for sharing data with XMPP-based notifications, but so far, it doesn't seem like there is any front-end access to this framework just yet. In the future, though, this could be used for all kinds of interesting projects and might provide a good way for Mozilla to tie all its different projects together closer.

API?

When the first version of Weave was released, it seemed Mozilla was going to provide developers with an API to hook into by version 0.2. However, the current release does not mention an API anywhere, so it looks like developers will have to wait just a little bit longer before they can start developing their own tools on top of the Weave framework.

Competition

There are, of course, already quite a few services available that provide a very similar function, most notably Foxmarks (which we named one of the Top 10 Firefox add-ons in 2006) and Del.icio.us. There are also numerous other bookmarking service available through plugins for Firefox (and IE) and while it has abandoned Browser Sync, Google hasn't (yet?) given up on the development of Google Bookmarks, though.

By making Weave part of the standard installation of Firefox at some point, though, and by providing a web front-end, Mozilla could easily bypass all of its competitors by providing a more seamless experience.

Mozilla is launching the service with a set of organizing principles to reassure users of their privacy and the intentions of the project. Those principles are reprinted below and in my mind will make it easier for consumers to trust Mozilla with their data:

Mozilla 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

Image via Mozilla Labs.

Mozilla presented some initial use cases for Weave including data backup, using Firefox from anywhere (or on mobile devices) using personalized info (like your history and bookmarks), and collaborative bookmarking. The next version of Weave, planned for 2008, will include a set of APIs for developers to build additional services that can access and (presumably) store metadata.

Weave and Data Portability

The first thing I thought of when reading about Weave was the project being undertaken by the folks at DataPortability.org to create a standardized set of protocols for sharing and remixing our data. It seems to me that Weave has many of the same goals: increased control over personal information, anywhere access to that information, easier third party access to information, etc.

As Dan Farber points out, Mozilla has 15-20 projects in development ranging in areas from calendars to email to instant messaging. Weave could potentially hook into all of these in the future and begin to draw together the pieces of the mythical web OS.

But by supporting things like OpenID and OAuth, could Weave potentially act as a hub and delegator for all of our online activities and personal information? That already seems to be a goal of the project, and Weave appears to operate with many of the same ethical principles as the DataPortability.org project (i.e., users have control of their information and how it is shared), and it further seems to me that something like OAuth could make Weave even more secure for users. Support for the data portability stack would, in my opinion, make Weave a more powerful framework and help define standards for data portability that would benefit all users in the long run.

According to a statement in the comments of a blog post by Mozilla Labs VP and General Manager Chris Beard, Mozilla is open to working with the data portability stack. "We've definitely been following openid, oath, etc. very closely as well," he wrote. "The focus first should be on what can and should the browser do as an intelligent agent on behalf of the user and then we can determine how best to get there from here."

What do you think of Mozilla Weave? What would you like to see developers build using the forthcoming Weave API?