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Comment by niftich | Hacker News Reader

StumbleUpon meets Facebook News Feed in your browser!

What's Mozilla's goal here? Making a play for ads? The appearance of feature parity with whatever Google (and now Microsoft) puts out?

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This isn't an ad play at all. It's an attempt to build features into the browser that help people find new contextually relevant web sites. Say you're on YouTube watching a video. Where are the outbound links? How do you get to other sites that are embedding or linking to the video to see what they have to say? Today you can't because YouTube wants to keep you in YouTube. But what if your browser could tell you about related sites so you could escape YouTube and find great contextually relevant content out on the Open Web? Wouldn't that be nice? Nothing to do with advertising at all.

Right, so it's a competitor to Facebook Graph [1], which uses a combination of data mining (from Facebook) and special xmlish tags that website operators can put on their page [2].

It sounds like if you opt in to this venture, it will use your browsing habits to mine those relationships; I wonder if it will ingest Facebook's "OpenGraph" tags [2].

[1] https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/opengraph/using...

[2] http://ogp.me/

Where are the people who are asking for help with this? Will people who value having fewer distractions on their screens be opted into this great content?

And what about spam?

I see a few attempts by Mozilla at social networks using open web technology. "Hello" was one.

I think the distributed, federated approach such as Friendica (et al.) will be more likely to succeed than this, in large part due to data ownership concerns.

That said, variety in this space is always welcome. We, as the users, can only benefit from it.

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