A few teaser posts have appeared over the last few days about this new Firefox add-on called “Geode”, which promises to “understand location, enabling enriched, personalized, and localized content”. There has been a slightly muted reaction to this, possibly due to the fact that it’s supposed to be available today and yet there’s no sign of it in the labs. Some people think these features are now common-place and therefore not that exciting at all.

I disagree! Though with such a small amount of actual information about the add-on, it seems like it will make it easier for the common user (eg not the geospatial or computer geek) to ask questions like “find curry houses near me” or “give me directions to the cinema”. Imagine, if it was integrated with Ubiquity, how straightforward that would be? This comes closest to an unobtrusive location app for the desktop in the same way that we (well some of us anyway) now expect from our phone or ipod.