Mozilla Shows Off TowTruck, for Browser-based Collaboration

Over at Mozilla, they continue to throw spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks. Mozilla Labs is out with an early alpha version of TowTruck, a project designed to facilitate Skype-style collaboration online, leveraging new features found in the Firefox and Chrome browsers. In a post announcing the experiment, Mozilla Labs warns that the technology is experimental at this point, but it looks like a very easy way to incorporate real-time collaboration into any website.

To get TowTruck working on your website, you simply cut and paste a couple of strings of code, and then your site features a TowTruck icon. (See the screenshot above.)

The icon allows for generating unique links that can tbe shared online with other users to initiate text chatting or voice communications. TowTruck may also eventually incorporate LiveAudio features.

You can try TowTruck out here, and it sounds like Mozilla plans to develop this technology further this year. It appears to be simple enough, developers can customize it in various ways, and it takes advantage of features already built into the browsers that you probably use.