Headup: a Firefox extension for social networking
By Michael W. Jones
Firefox users with a zest for details and social networking may want to take a close look at a new extension called headup from Tel Aviv-based startup SemantiNet. headup does a semantic lookup, in the background, on keywords in the current browser page, then quietly signals the user if there may be interesting additional information available.
The headup Website describes the product like this: “headup is your personal discovery agent to the Web. It’s an intelligent browser add-on that enriches your browsing experience by bringing meaningful content to you. headup works on Firefox and provides easy access to personally-relevant content from all over the web. The data is presented as an additional layer on top of the page you’re viewing. headup brings you discoveries about products, places, movies or bands you’ll like or be curious about – all that without interfering with your browsing.”
The product itself delivers on that promise. The headup extension acts as an inference engine, looking for meaningful connections, based upon the information in your active browser page. Much of this information is from the world of social networking and the blogosphere, so the extension should be very popular with people that spend a great deal of time in those worlds. These days, that target group comprises most of us on the Web.
Basically, headup can help you gather two types of information, both seamlessly integrated with Firefox and both happening unobtrusively in the background. First, headup can deliver information from a number of social networking and other sites about a person or other subject matter. Second, headup will serve up opinions from your personal networking sites and friends about that subject. If information of either kind is available, headup causes a small yellow symbol to be displayed in the foreground to alert you that additional information has been found. Click on the symbol, and the information is displayed.
Headup uses Microsoft’s Silverlight 2 technology to work it’s magic quietly in the background while still keeping additional information at your fingertips. The Silverlight technology seems to operate flawlessly in the case of headup, working with all versions of Firefox 3, including the one for OS X.
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on Friday, October 17th, 2008 at 8:43 pm
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May 21st, 2009
Hi Michael,
My name is Mike and I’m the marketing guy for Headup. I ran into this post of yours entirely by chance and was pleasantly surprised to see how supportive your review is.
It’s been a while since we were the closed Beta you reviewed. Headup is now a publicly available Mozilla approved addon and includes a proprietary music player, social annotator and a whole bunch of other goodies. Check us out – it’s fun and free : ) https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/10359
Cheers,
Mike
“I tweet @headup”