
Mozilla Context Graph: It’s time to bring context back to the web - st3fan
https://medium.com/@osunick/context-graph-its-time-to-bring-context-back-to-the-web-a7542fe45cf3#.cs443lrn0
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DeadBabyOrgasm
This is an interesting thought experiment. It seems Mozilla is trying to lower
the barrier to entry for the average, small website compared to the giants in
the space right now by providing a tool built into the browser itself.

In my experience, this is an ambitious goal. As humans, we don't like change
and, as a whole, won't do it without strong reason. Opening your browser means
going to the bigger sites (e.g., Facebook) because they're convenient. The
convenience isn't due to only thinking Facebook when thinking of social media,
it's about what features Facebook offers me as its user.

If, on the other hand, the goal is more for the audience than the small
websites, and it's to expose the average viewer to more variety, why not
partner with Stumbleupon, Reddit, or one of many other community link-
aggregation platforms?

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niftich
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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asadotzler
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.

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niftich
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...](https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/opengraph/using-
objects)

[2] [http://ogp.me/](http://ogp.me/)

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johnymontana
Does anyone know what type of technology will be powering this? Is Mozilla
building some sort of graph database to make this work?

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st3fan
We are just getting started and most of this is still in the design phase.
Technology choices will have to be made.

The two most concrete things right now related to Context Graph are probably
Activity Stream and the Fathom project. Fathom is an experimental framework to
extract meaning from web pages ad can be used for a wide range of
applications.

Production builds of Activity Stream can installed via TestPilot.

[https://github.com/mozilla/activity-
stream](https://github.com/mozilla/activity-stream)
[https://github.com/mozilla/fathom](https://github.com/mozilla/fathom)
[https://testpilot.firefox.com](https://testpilot.firefox.com)

