December 4th, 2006
End the heartbreak of repetitive registrations!
I just had dinner with Dick Hardt of Sxip. He’s about to launch Sxipper, an open-source, "learning" version of those familiar adware wallet tools. This one will be a Firefox plug-in, coming out in a couple of weeks. It's free, but (natch) there's a charge for premium services.
The basic idea is that you keep your own personal data locally, stored in your browser (by the plug-in extension, actually). Meanwhile, Sxipper reads most Web fill-in-the-blanks forms and maps their fields onto your data. (Yes, you can have multiple personas for work/home addresses, etc.) But – as anyone who has used these tools knows – they often mess up, entering your address where your name should be, and so forth. Sxipper is extensible; it lets users "map" new forms – by filling in their data, which implicitly identifies the fields – and then it stores the mapping on the Sxipper server. When user B comes to the same site, Sxipper fetches the mapping from the Sxipper server. So rather than do a lot of semantic tagging itself, Sxipper relies on user-generated metadata to parse each new form once only, and then shares the results among its users. Pretty cool.
Esther Dyson is an editor at large at CNET Networks and author of ZDNet's Release 0.9 blog. See her complete bio and full disclosure of industry affiliations. Although she can't respond to all e-mails, you can contact Esther here.
