ClientSideCustomization2

From MashupCamp

Contents 1 Introduction 2 Recap 3 Views of customization 4 Communities of customizers and sharing 5 How to make your system customization-ready? 6 What is Customization? 7 What are the best client-side customizations? 8 Advertising and business models

Introduction

This session was a follow-up to the previous discussion on client-side customization. The general goals for this talk were to explore some of the consequences of customization as well as generally why users do it, why providers should are about it, and a handful of other things.

Recap

• Levels of customization: restyling (adding/moding css) => combining and/or aggregating (NetVibes, Widgets, etc) => layering and/or adding (bookmarklets) => moding content (platypus, adblock) => moding content and functionality (greasemonkey) => other?
• There is a distinction between user customization and client-side customization. User customization can take place on the desktop or on a server. Client-side customization is solely those activities that take place on the desktop (in the browser?). In both situations it is often a discussion of what happens to information after it has been served by the provider.

Views of customization

Several people drew diagrams of how they saw customization. Here are approximations of those original drawings (please feel free to correct any errors I may have made in digitizing the diagrams).

• Reynaldo Gil described his view of the client-customization space. In this diagram the web contains data, media, software, services, content, etc. These resources are delivered to the users via HTML and HTTP where they can be combined and integrated inside the browser using various tools, scripts, etc.

• Tessa Lau sees an inverted pyramid in which the hard-core developers and coders represent a small number of people at the base, on which other (less hard-core?) coders can build and work (e.g., the applications developers are dependent on the systems developers). The pyramid widens at higher layers, indicating the greater accessibility of the development and the broader participation. At the top is a much larger number of customizers.

Communities of customizers and sharing

• How can web close the loop on customization and allow providers access to customizations? Do customizations present viable innovations and product extensions which providers may wish to incorporate into their applications or content? Communities of customization?

• A personal (personalizable) space -- not owned by any company? Sharable? For more discussion of sharing of customization check out some of the work done by Wendy Mackay (http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/99332.99356).

How to make your system customization-ready?

• Open standards, structural markup (CSS and DOM manipulation)
• RESTful system design
• Microformats
• Others?

What is Customization?

• Browser extension/modification which does not necessarily require an HTTP connection
• Anything that happens after information leaves the content or service provider's servers

What are the best client-side customizations?

• Google Personalized Homepage
• Feed Aggregator
• FireFox extensions
• Zimbra
• Post-its (3rd Voice)

Advertising and business models

• What happens when users can filter/strip the advertising from your content?
• The content becomes the advertisement.
• Security model - downloading customization scripts and running code on my machine, can I trust the source?