Newswise — While still a teenager, Blake Ross helped start the Mozilla Firefox project, a spin-off of Netscape's Web browser. Firefox has been downloaded by more than 200 million people worldwide, even threatening the supremacy of one of Microsoft's flagship programs, Internet Explorer.
Although Firefox was ultimately wrought from the work of thousands of programmers in the free-software community, Ross became a poster boy for the revolution. So one of the most commonly heard questions, in certain circles, is "What's Blake up to now?" Until now, no one knew. In this first exclusive look, the 20-year-old software wunderkind shows journalist David Kushner the answer, a system called Parakey.
Parakey is supposed to close the gap between the desktop and the Web. "Right now, people want to shuffle around content," Ross says, "but the world's fused together by a collection of hacks." Something that should be simple, say, getting photos from a digital camera onto the Web, is an impossible task for many people, and you'd need more arms than Vishnu to juggle all the things you'd like to on the Web. To upload those photos, for example, you have to dump your images into one folder, then transfer them to an image-sharing site such as Flickr. Moving videos to YouTube is completely different. If you want to make a personal Web page within an online community, you have to join a social network such as MySpace or Friendster. If you intend to rant about politics or movies, you launch a blog and link to it from your other pages. The mess of the Web, in other words, leaves you trapped in a big tangle of actions, service providers, and applications.
Parakey is designed to cut through all that confusion. It doesn't exist on the Web, or on the desktop, but rather on both at once. And yet it's supposed to be simple enough for Ross's mother to use.
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