Headup Uses Microsoft’s Silverlight to Give Real-Time Semantic Web Data
Semantic web company Semantinet has released a Firefox plugin that uses Microsoft Silverlight technology to bring true top-down semantic web functionality to the pages you view.
Headup is the name of the product, and it scans the pages you are looking at and provides pinpoint icons that users can click on to get more information about topics you are exploring.
For example, if you’re reading about a television show, Headup will give you access to YouTube clips, pictures of the cast on Flickr, how many of your Facebook friends favorited the show, etc. Headup is also functional with Twitter, Friendfeed, Digg, Google, Yahoo, and Wikipedia, as well as many others.
Optimizing for such sites provides tech-geeks with instant gratification: if you were to run into a story about Louis Gray, for instance, clicking next to his name would show a Friendfeed-esqe real-time expression of his social media footprint.
Headup is currently in beta mode, and prospective users need to make a request in order to get in on the fun. No luck for me so far, but I will update after I get to actually test it myself.
The possibilities are interesting, especially if the program fully develops intuitive properties. Users who use a lot of financial websites would be very interested in having a plugin that showed them stock quotes for any company they ran into while reading a story. That might not be right for every viewer; perhaps an activist would like to know the carbon footprint of a company they were reading about. The idea is the web become more adapted to you.
This is part of the reason Semantinet chose Silverlight: privacy concerns. According to Semantinet, Silverlight provides better privacy controls, and better allows them to work with both PC and Mac. Another feather in Microsoft’s security cap, for sure.
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