The U-Web enables you to intuitively share, integrate and update your friends and your right-here, right-now mobile stuff:
People, identities and profiles in your phonebook and your Facebook. Stuff like photos off your mobile camera and photos on Flickr. Your personal messages, your public Twitter updates. The videos, reviews, comments, news, meetup times, calendars and current map locations of you and your friends.
Merged and tracked as they change; the U-Web will magically shuffle and combine all this dynamic, interactive data around for you, according to the permissions you set.
A U-Web mobile application will merge these on- and off-device people, media, times and places in a single, seamless interface - with one map and one calendar.
The U-Web is an open distributed Mobile 2.0 platform; an interactive 'mashup ecosystem' for people, media, times and places.
The U-Web was introduced in a blog post, here, and further expanded in this blog post.
Mobile 2.0 takes the best of mobile:
Mobile 2.0 is all about people and their stuff:
People just love to share new stuff, and the connected, location-aware smartphone is the perfect device. There are hundreds of millions of these increasingly capable devices in the hands of consumers worldwide - some of whom don't have easy or regular access to the PC, the landline or wired broadband.
Mobile 2.0 is a live opportunity that will make Web 2.0 look like a warm-up.
The Killer App for Mobile 2.0 is a platform for seamlessly and intuitively sharing, mashing and updating people and stuff, local and remote, personal and public. These are the requirements for the U-Web Mobile 2.0 platform:
The U-Web Mobile 2.0 platform can bring new levels of seamless usability to the connected, location-aware mobile experience, with integration of interactive content from the handset (that represents you) to your social networks and online stuff. And beyond, to third party and new interactive content. It aims to blend into your life - to merge your real with your virtual.
The U-Web has parallels (and considerable compatibility) with the Web:
Like the Web, the U-Web is based on open standards, meaning that all the above functionality can be implemented by many separate groups of developers. No-one will own the U-Web - or have to do all the work themselves! It will allow anyone to join in and offer interactive content - an unlimited ecosystem of mashups. Specifically, the U-Web has an open protocol and notation for peer-to-peer multicast data updates, rather than the Web's client-server document publishing.
The U-Web application is like a browser, except that, instead of a Web browser's essentially one-way static document viewing, it's a two-way interactive and dynamic data viewer meant for mashups and having both 2D and 3D as a native render. It will have a tactile, intuitive interface optimised for people, media, times and places, rather than for linear text. Unlike in the Web, in the U-Web, you, as a user of this application, are a first class dynamic entity, visible to others. Unlike a Web browser, the U-Web application will natively have access to all your machine capabilities such as PIM data, Media, GPS coordinates, accelerometer, vibration, telephony and camera.
This shows a simulation of the U-Web platform application running as the top or idle screen on a smartphone. Here you see two sidebars in dark grey. The left sidebar has all the applications you need handy - browsers, calculator, games, etc. This is where you may do your more document-oriented or office work. The right sidebar has controls to turn on or off sound, bluetooth, Wifi, GPS, etc, as well as access to other settings and phone functions. It has a big lock button to save you messing around.
The central panel is where the mashup happens: it's a view on people, things, times and places. Here there's you, Sam and Joe, photos and music, messages, places and reviews, meetups, alarms (the red star) and weather. Some people may come from your phonebook, some from your Facebook. Some of those 'status messages' or 'Tweets' may be from Facebook, some from Twitter. Some photos may have just been taken on your camera, some may be on Flickr, owned by you or offered by someone else to the public. Messages may come via SMS or IM or even old-school email.
There are three strips. The top one is a tag-based view, the middle one a spatial or map view, the bottom one a time or calendar view. People and stuff can populate none, any or all of these three views: if tagged 'Sam' they can appear inside the Sam tag; if geo-tagged with GPS latitude and longitude, they can appear there on the map; if timestamped they can appear then in the calendar. The top and bottom (tag and calendar) view strips can be dragged left and right to explore more. The map can be dragged in all directions. If one of the top or bottom strips is dragged in towards the map, it opens up to full size, allowing even more people and stuff to be seen at once. If either top of bottom strips is dragged out to the edge, the map takes over the full screen.
The tags can be sorted by most-used, recently-used or by most-and-recently-used. The calendar can be set to day, week, month, year views. The views can be focused and drilled in many different ways - for example, given a person, find them on the map, find all their photos and related tags, find the appointments with them. If a single entity (person, message, photo, etc) is touched, it opens up a full-screen button panel for various view settings and state changes. The first view is 'open' - which drills into the entity. Once inside, you can hop from entity to entity or back to the main view - a calendar event may allow you to jump to the map location or into an attendee, and then to either their address on the map, or to their current GPS location.
People, media, times and places can come from your own phone (add a contact, take a picture, write a message, create a calendar entry, find your position on the map). Or they can come from your friends' phones if they share them with you. Or from public and/or third party sources. Each source can overlay: you may have a group-private map location overlaid by restaurant reviews from a third party. Remote servers can adapt Twitter, Facebook and Flickr to allow their content to be seamlessly mashed up with your own phone content. Identities and contacts are merged and resolved either automatically or with some prompting and manual intervention.
There are no central servers and, like the Web, third parties don't have to ask anyone's permission to offer interactive content - the protocols and formats are open to all. They can either use Web 2.0 APIs to adapt an existing system, or create new, U-Web-native sources of interactive content. Note that your friends don't even need to be U-Web users to be visible to you. Loss of Internet will be handled gracefully - stuff from others will still be visible, but simply not updated. Since there are no central servers, loss of a server only affects the particular content it sources and 'animates' for you.
Take a photo, set share-with-friends and it's automatically made visible to them to chat about on the map location where it was taken. If they take a picture where they are, you see that, too. Then arrange a meeting with your friends based on reviews, weather and other public information. The shared calendar event can be updated by anyone in the group and the changes notified to the group. Comments can be added to the public restaurant review, after discovering what it was really like...
You don't send messages in the U-Web: you write some text, then expose that text to one or more people who then get notified. Messages and photos you create have a number of publishing options available when you touch them to bring up the button panel: private, group or public, where group is any group of people defined by you or by others. More likely than a single message, is that you would share a dialogue with one or more people, which is what is shown above ('Me/Sam' - or you could have 'Me/Sam/Joe'). Every person has a 'status' or Twitter message, also shown above.
If you just want to call Sam, touch the box and hit the 'call' button. If you want to call someone not currently in any view, start typing: all text input is seen as a tag, which is autocompleted and appears in the tag strip. So 'Tim' would bring up the Tim tag, with the Tim person and any other stuff you have access to that is tagged 'Tim'. All tag results are sorted as private first, then group, then public, with recency of use over that. Or you can choose - only most and recently used public results, for example. People and stuff can also be found from a view by opening something up and pushing the 'show related' button.
If you're on the map and want a cash machine, and know that CashFind.com do a cash machine locator service, you don't download their app with their login and their map, you just type 'cashfind': this tag will have a collection containing thousands of cash machines, all waiting to be planted on the map where you are by opening the collection and hitting the 'show on current map' button - only local ones will be plotted and this overlay stays until you revisit the collection and turn this off. If the collection is updated, the map is updated too.
You don't actually need a special calendar event thing: just type a new note saying 'Meet Sam at the Tate Modern tomorrow lunchtime', and it is linked up automatically to Sam and/or his tag, to the Tate Modern tag and its place on the map, and to 12:30pm on tomorrow's calendar; all text is autocompleted to known words. Photos are automatically geo-tagged, timestamped and linked to the taker by both their tag and a direct link to their person entity.
Further descriptions will follow on these topics:
This site holds the open standards or specifications for the protocol and the notation of the U-Web, supporting its Entities, States, Links and Observers. Note that the Entities are now called the more familiar 'Objects', and the U-Web acquires the name 'Object Web'. The site also points to a reference implementation.
[9421]