Re Ubiquity, it is also seriously lacking a security and code-trusting model (or was last time I looked) so hopefully it can share that at least with Jetpack (and perhaps even with the W3C Widgets group?).

Here’s some old Google Social Graph API code I made into a Ubiquity thing last year. Basically it takes the current Web page URL and feeds it to Google’s JSON/REST lookup service, which returns FOAF and XFN/hCard microformat markup, so if you’re lucky it’ll find blogs, rss, photo, twitter or whatever. I have other commitments today or I’d directly try to hack it into jetpack – but thought it might be useful/interesting for others if I don’t get to it first. Code is at http://pastebin.com/f1619269

Jetpacks currently have full chrome privileges, although the jetpack people are working on a security model very aggressively.

I have also experienced problems trying to get multiple jetpacks subscribed at the same time. Presumably, I did something dumb with my hack. Standard8 (Mark Banner) has implemented support for notification bars in Thunderbird content tabs, so we can now subscribe to jetpacks the right way(tm). At least if you can get a content tab to open… we don’t expose that yet.

An example more along the lines of your desires is:
http://hg.mozilla.org/users/bugmail_asutherland.org/jetpack-tb-examples/file/a117452f167b/message-display/trivial/message-displayed-slidebar.js

Check out the other examples in the repository too.

I am not currently working anything related to Ubiquity. While also exciting, Jetpack is of primary interest because it provides an easy-to-use extension model and soon a security model. I think everyone would be excited to see someone champion Ubiquity in Thunderbird.

Any chance of an example that shows how to also include the original message. For example, I’d like to do a lookup of a person (sender) against google social graph API, and add a little info (maybe photo etc) at the top; but below that I’d like the entire original message to show as before.

Also – is there any relationship between this and the effort to include Ubiquity in Thunderbird?

What kind of privileges will be available to the .js code? Can I write to SQLlite storage, for example? or copy/move messages between folders based on user interaction?