This week a new UK startup, Hubbub (note the .me domain), launches a new kind of desktop application for the semantic web, built on top of FriendFeed. That’s an interesting diversion for the UK. Many services coming out of the UK and Europe have been built on top of Twitter, not FriendFeed, although the latter is being tipped for big things next year by key commentators such as Robert Scoble.
Hubbub has been created to allow the different types of information within FriendFeed to be ‘skinned’ with a variety of gadgets and widgets. The gadgets can be created with a varioey of means, including HTML, XForms, Flash or Silverlight, which means it is pretty straightforward for other developers to extend the Hubbub application.
Hubbub launches initially in private beta but for a limited period, anyone can sign-up. It will launch with gadgets to show the time and location where an individual is, play the person’s last.fm radio station, view a person’s streams (such as blog posts or YouTube updates), and a gadget to update your Twitter status.
The idea is to work on the Hubbub API to the point where others can develop widgets and gadgets that make use of both a person’s FriendFeed data and other information that the user has stored, to create “rich” gadgets in terms of user interaction and semantically.
There are several videos of Hubbub in action here.
Hubbub has been created by Hubbub Inc., a company set up by London-based webBackplane, a team application developers. Mark Birbeck is CEO of webBackplane, and works with the W3C on a number of related standards. He is also the inventor of RDFa, a new way to place semantic web information into any web document.
I just hope people don’t get them confused with HubDub.
Here’s an introductory video to Hubbub: