Map This is a FireFox add-on that allows the user to quickly send an address from a Web page to Google Maps. After being installed, Map This adds a menu item to the FireFox context menu. When the user selects an address then right clicks and selects "Map This," the feature passes the address to Google Maps and opens a new window.

This is a pretty simple little feature, but because of it's narrow focus it is able to do something quite powerful. It is acknowledges a specific type of data on a Web page, an address, and allows the user to perform an action on that data in a way that intelligently matches matches the data type. Actually, I give the widget too much credit. It cannot tell the difference between an address and any other selected string of text. However, the concept of the widget is moving in the right direction.

I wrote about a similar convenience widget, the Skype Toolbar, that detects phone numbers on a Web page and allows the user to initiate Skype calls from the context menu. Again, the feature understands the context of the text string and provides actions that suit the data type.

From a conceptual view, very compelling interactions could be created if the browser understood different types of data and was able to provide actions to match the context. For example the browser might recognize a string of selected text as an address, a person's name, or a song title and allow the user to act on that data in context. If the user highlighted a classified ad, the browser could understand that the user might want to save the ad, respond to it, print it, compare it to similar ads, etc.

There are many identifiers used by the browser to create awareness of data type, but none, to the best of my knowledge, are used to identify how textual data could be employed in a useful way. Web 2.0 style tags offer a classification system which is useful for searching and grouping similar types of data. However, tags do not have an awareness of the user's context. The HTML OBJECT tag allows the browser to acknowledge data types like movie or audio files but not the semantics of a string of text.

To get at the user's context and offer functionality to match, the meaning of text strings will have to be understood on a programmatic level by the browser, an add-on, or the Web site which contains the text.

Labels: convenience widget, ue design