Labs/Ideas

(These need to be organized into categories for easier digestion. Ideally, we have a structured format, tags, browseable, searchable, submission date, author and contact info.)

Idea: Reflect geolocation into the DOM

Initially for mobile browser applications but could be extended for wireless roaming. Imagine going to fandango.com and it already knows what area you are in. Or going to maps.yahoo.com and Yahoo! Maps knows where to start the default map. Advertising can be specific not only to the user, but also to where the user is physically at.

Idea: Presence, attention & tagging

Develop an extension which would show you which of your friends are online, what they're tagging, etc. sort of a combination between IM and tagging.

Idea: Photo Management

Develop experiments in what to build into the user interface to allow easier moving around of pictures/video/etc -- in particular from a user's desktop to the web

Idea: Clickstream control & Privacy

Offer users ways to give users control and insight into their attention and clickstream. Are users willing to have their clickstream anonymized, aggregated and monetized? "Will you give me your clickstream for a free latte at Starbuck's?"

- ZPhone
- Tor

Idea: Microformat Detection

Notify presence of of microformats in pages, display metadata about them, etc.

- Microformats

Idea: Metadata Handler Extension API

Add an API to Firefox that lets core code and extensions register themselves as metadata handlers, get notifications when users load pages containing metadata, and get hooks into the UI for providing capabilities to users (f.e. "email all the people on this page" and "add the people on this page to my address book" for an hCard handler). More details

Idea: Active identity Management
- Yadis

Idea: Media-related
- Gnash
- VLC
- DjVu
- Vorbis

Ideally we want to be able to switch plugins such as Quicktime that cannot be installed automatically via the update service with software that can.

Idea: Improve download process
- Metalink
- Bittorrent support (perhaps code can be taken from AllPeers for this)
- Cross-session resumable downloads