For those of you who are wondering what’s going on with the Weave project, we wanted to give a quick status update.

Over the last few weeks, we’ve been busy with the usual hacking making Weave more useful and stable for our users.

We’ve added some new and some familiar faces to our team.

+ Mike Connor. We are really excited to have Mike join our team to hack on Weave. His experience leading Firefox is going to be invaluable as we work towards making Weave a rock solid service for users.

+ Anant Narayanan. Anant was an intern last year and is back for the summer working on several cool Weave projects.

+ Ragavan Srinivasan. Ragavan joins the team as a PM who will be responsible for making sure we continue building a useful service that furthers the Weave vision.

We’ve also been doing some hard thinking on where we would like to see Weave go next. Most of this thinking is still in the very early stages, but here are a couple of thoughts that we’d like to share and get your feedback on:

Increasing Weave stability and scalability.
There are a few open bugs we’d like to tackle.

While we aren’t going to get to all of them right away, there is a reasonable number in there that we’d like to resolve soon. You should see more activity on this front soon along with a call to action. But, don’t wait for us. If you are interested in a particular bug, let us know by leaving a comment on bugzilla. If you are a developer and want to get involved in the Weave project, pick a bug and get going.

We are also going to be restarting our regular meetings and bug triage sessions real soon now. We’ll share details shortly here as well as on the Weave wiki pages.

Revising the Weave vision.
We crafted the initial vision for Mozilla Weave in late 2007. While the core concepts outlined in that vision still remain true and continue to guide the project, we are also increasingly aware of rapid change and innovation across the open, social web. We feel this is a good time for us to revise some aspects of the original vision. A couple of examples of what we’ve been thinking about include:

+ One of the most popular features of the Weave platform is Sync that allows you to synchronize your browser meta-data in the cloud. Over time, people have started equating Weave to Sync. We need to do a better job of explaining that Sync is one (important) aspect of Weave, but Weave is a lot more than Sync.

+ We’ve mentioned before that user identity is an important building block for the open web. Yet, it continues to be fraught with usability issues. Some of the recent efforts like OpenID are making admirable progress in making this easy for users, but we agree there’s room for improvement. We demonstrated one such possible improvement previously. A question we keep coming back to is what role should the browser play in online identity?

We hope to continue evolving our thinking on this over the next few weeks and we’ll share them frequently via this blog and other forums.

As always, if you have any thoughts on the above topics or anything related to Weave, we’d love to hear from you. Please post your comments here or on the Weave discussion group .

—
Dan Mills, Ragavan Srinivasan on behalf of the Weave team