Mozilla Labs

What is Joey?

When you browse the Web, there is a great deal of important content that becomes inaccessible as soon as you walk away from your personal computer. Whether it’s the driving directions that you looked up or your favorite sports teams’ latest scores, you lose access to that information as soon as you turn off your computer.

Mobile browsing is intended to solve this problem: just use the browser on your phone to access the content you need. However, as we all know, this isn’t the greatest experience; there is too much data to download, the data is hard to reach, the content isn’t formatted for the phone. Quickly retrieving specific pieces of information using a mobile device needs to be easier.

Project Joey brings the Web content you need most to your mobile phone by allowing you to easily send it to your device. You can quickly mark content that is important to you and have that content always available while using your mobile phone.

The premise is this: you can use Firefox to send text clippings, pictures, videos, RSS content, and Live Bookmarks to your phone through the Joey Server. The Joey Server transcodes and keeps all of the content up-to-date. You can then use your phone’s browser or the Joey application on your phone to view and manage what you have uploaded.

The goal is to investigate the mobile space using a desktop-centric model. Like many other Mozilla projects, there are no plans to productize Joey. We will work with the community to build a compelling and usable tool that people will enjoy using.

Although we are in the early stages of development, much of Joey is usable today. Feel free to go to joey.labs.mozilla.com using Firefox, create an account, and give Joey a try. The Joey application for mobile devices isn’t complete yet, but in the meantime you can access information on the Joey server from your mobile device using any type of mobile browser.

Developer Information

Want to help out? Great! You can start by reading the documents below, checking out the code, and looking over our to-do list. If you’re developing, please get on IRC and join #joey.

View the source code

Important Documents

Communication Protocol
Database Design

Discuss Joey

In addition to commenting below, you can also discuss joey on the labs forums.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 16th, 2007 at 5:18 pm and is filed under Mozilla Labs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.