Udo's Techblog

I've been using Foxmarks since the dawn of time, and for quite a while it's been a very useful service. Foxmarks is a plugin that synchronizes your bookmarks across different browsers and computers. One day they announced, they'd be calling themselves XMarks and they said there were radical improvements in the service. Announcements like this always make me nervous, and it turns out I was right again this time. Soon after installing the "upgrade", little XMarks icons started popping up all over the place. XMarks not only modified pages like search results and cluttered the addressbar with useless self-promoting icons, it was also quite clearly monitoring my internet use.

Enter Mozilla Labs' Weave project. It's been around for about two years at this point, but practically nobody has heard of it. It essentially does the same job, namely syncing your browser settings in a secure environment.

What really caught my attention is the fact that they're working on incorporating OpenID-like identity authentication into the framework which is going to be excessively cool. Both as a user and as a developer I've been frustrated by OpenID's complexity and disruptive user experience, I'm really stoked to see how Weave turns out in this regard!