2008-03-20

Making the connection between Gears, GreaseMonkey, JXTA, and OpenID

A while back, I wrote-up a "Collaborative GreaseMonkey" patent disclosure. It was a defensive measure to make sure no one else patented the idea and prevented the rest of us from using it. The disclosure never made it past our patent committee, and I think that is fine, since it is at least documented as prior art in some way. The code never got to the point where it was worth sharing, but I do plan to revive it at some point.

I'm seeing that more and more people are starting to get ideas that are more and more similar to what I had in mind. Today, I read about someone dreaming up thoughts on using Google Gears to perform OpenID and OAuth. I like the thought pattern.

Gears, GreaseMonkey, OpenID, and P2PSockets (JXTA) have the potential to re-invent the web and to establish a real web operating system. Gears enables the JavaScript written into web pages to become part of a real, persistent application with persistent data storage and threads. GreaseMonkey provides a solution to edit existing web applications with user-controled, local customizations and to create applications fully local, without needing to learn how to write a web server application. OpenID gives a single solution for authenticating yourself across those web applications. P2PSockets allows the applications and data you host locally to be discovered on the web without needing to own a web server.

The result is an application building environment that is an incremental step from simple HTML+JavaScript editing and allows everyone to invent their own web, rather than just rely on the web that the social networking sites control today.

The success of this web is, of course, controlled by the economy it creates. An a-la-carte business model, like the one provided by Amazon's web services, is a great way to ensure that the bandwidth and data storage necessary for the locally-hosted services to scale.

Thoughts?

1 comment:

  1. hey there....i couldn't agree more. I'm actually in the middle of writing a very similar blog entry, only from a users perspective. I think that the connections made between gears and greasemonkey are epic. This could very well be the begining of Web 3.0. I've already seen a step by step guide to taking wikipedia offline...script included.

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