Spectrum Online reports that Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt are working on a system called “Parakey“, which essentially will be a downloaded application that turns your PC into a local server, and allows you to seamlessly drag web content (photos, text, movies, calendars, bookmarks, RSS feeds, etc) into you Parakey “site”, and easily control who can and cannot view it with a color coded “key” system.

The system will employ it’s own programming language (dubbed “JUL” which stands for “Just another User interface Language”). The code will be open source, in the hopes of attracting developers to create new applications for the platform. The goal will be to allow people to share content online directly from their computer, with more control over who can view it and how. And, with easier publishing capabilities than current systems that force people through many layers. Quote:

Grandparents love seeing their kids and grandkids on Flickr or Snapfish, but they’re often too intimidated to put their own pictures on these sites. The reason, in part, is that they have to jump through many hoops: dragging pictures here, uploading them there. Parakey, inherently (and potentially profitably), is aimed at making it easier for them—and everyone else—to get their stuff online.

It’s not just grandparents who aren’t using the Web as much as they could—it’s everyone. Right now, Ross says, “we have two wildly advanced platforms—the desktop operating system and the Internet. That leaves users with a frustrating choice. Do you want to create content with powerful tools in an ad-free environment and bury it in a system that’s accessible anytime, but only in one place and by one person?” The alternative, he says, is weaker tools and an ad-heavy space that can be accessed by anyone anywhere, but only when you’re online. “We don’t believe people should have to make that choice,” he says.

The goal of lowering the technological barrier for users is shared with the goal of making a system that allows developers to make many different content and event streams work well together:

JUL applications are themselves comprised of other applications that come in all shapes and sizes. The interface for Mrs. Anderson’s recipe application, for instance, might include much smaller ones such as a metric-to-English-units converter or photo-goes-here. “You’re not thinking at [the HTML] level anymore,” Ross says. “You’re thinking one level up. That will make it easier to build desktop applications on the Web.” And despite Ross’s connection to Firefox, Parakey will work with any browser.

JUL applications also notice Web events that take place when someone is reading a Parakey page—an update to a sports score, for example, or a new blog entry—and instantly update the page accordingly. Users of these applications don’t have to request these updates, and neither do the JUL developers who wrote them. They simply include “formulas” behind the scenes that reference different information sources. If a source changes, JUL automatically reevaluates the formulas—much as a spreadsheet does.

Parakey will be a for-profit venture, unlike the non-profit Firefox web browser project that Parakey founders Ross and Hewitt helped create. Parakey apparently intends to profit from an advertising system whose details have yet to be revealed.

From my own perspective, it seems that Parakey has more than a small chance of succeeding. Although, the area that it is entering is heavily contested for sure. Microsoft and Apple both have efforts to build these functions into their operating systems. Google and Yahoo are quickly buying up the best “pieces” (flickr, del.icio.us, JotSpot, YouTube, etc) that will allow them to potentially build an integrated system for web sharing. Yet, they both currently lack tight integration and ease of use across networks.

The paradox of a company like Yahoo buying a company like Flickr, for instance, is that Yahoo, on the one hand, needs to get Flickr tightly integrated with the rest of Yahoo’s tools (like Yahoogroups, del.icio.us, etc). Yet, huge part of the reason that Yahoo buys an existing system like del.icio.us or Flickr is because of the enthusiastic existing user base. But, if Yahoo or Google make too many changes too soon to a platform like del.icio.us, Flickr, or YouTube, they will risk driving people away, and into the arms of hundreds, sometimes thousands of competing systems. So, this time problem leaves an opening for a system like Parakey to possibly pass through and succeed. To succeed, it is likely that Parakey will need to:

• Give people an easy way to move from sites like del.icio.us, Flickr, or YouTube to Parakey
• Tap into similar energies that made the Spreadfirefox campaign succeed, but this time for an expanded audience (early adopters [creatives and teenagers], as well as Mothers and Fathers/Grandparents).
• Possibly consider using an increasing consumer awareness and inevitable backlash to their advantage, over web service providers co-opting the rights of content published to their sites. This could be used to their advantage by including an easy way for people to attach re-use rights, like creative commons licenses, to their content that they share. This can attract early adopter creatives, who then tend to attract mainstream users.
• Work before the Google, Yahoo WebOS, and Microsoft and Apple desktop-to-web efforts emerge as contenders.

My hunch is that the publicity circulating about Parakey is going to create pressures in this sector of the market, and send a lot of people working in this area back to the drawing board to think about , whether Parakey itself succeeds or not.

Another interesting related phenomenon is that users of more difficult-to-use open source social software are also working toward ways to tie together many different open source tools. For instance in Communitywiki, we are thinking about ContentRouting:

(image by LionKimbro )

Some elements of the ContentRouting idea is actually remarkably similar to the Parakey idea, except that the ContentRouting idea is being developed in open spaces, and largely enabled by (though not necassarily restricted to) open source software applications. Yet, ContentRouting also has the potential to interface with very many online destinations (wikis, blogs, social networking sites, etc). One currently working example is OddmuseToInkscape, which allows a few different ways to automatically route an Inkscape image directly to an Oddmuse wiki instance.