I had a funny moment earlier this week when I showed Google's Chrome to one of my friends. She was floored that one of the top nine most visited sites featured on the browser's start page was Woot.com. Given how much browsing I do as part of this job I suppose it was surprising even to me, but it's also a hint of how intriguing your browsing history can be to others.
A service called Timelope is banking on that idea, letting users share their browsing history (or at least selected parts of it) with the rest of the world. Unlike Friendfeed which aggregates just the items you want from the sources you have chosen, Timelope posts all of your activity in one large stream and does it passively without requiring you to click on anything out of the ordinary. You can then befriend other Timelope users and see what they're looking at (almost in real time) as long as they're sharing.
All of this hinges around a browser plug-in that currently only works for Firefox. You simply plug in your user name and password and it pipes over the data in the background once the page has loaded. You can turn it on and off with a just a click, and it remembers its state between browsing sessions so you don't accidentally start sending off things you don't want others to see.
There are some obvious privacy concerns here. Making what you're viewing online public, able to be searched, and timestamped is a very open window into your habits and who you are. There are, however, some decent protection measures you can instate, like an anonymous log-in and both a black and white list for controlling which sites are shown to others, even when the plug-in is turned on.
Another company that offers a very similar service and a slightly deeper analysis of your habits, along with a way to create private groups is Hooeey, which we profiled back in late 2007. I thought then, as I do now, that these services can be incredibly useful for a certain few, but are likely to instill fear in people who are already worried enough about having their e-mail passwords stolen, let alone sharing what they're doing with strangers.
Timelope is currently in private alpha but was still accepting new sign-ups when I published this.
Timelope lets you browse other people's browser history as well as publishing your own using a Firefox plug-in.
(Credit: CBS Interactive)
YouTube nets a perfect 1:1 gender ratio of users, however your browser history might be another story.
(Credit: CNET Networks)Mike Nolet of blog Mike on Ads has put together a fun little diversion that gives your browser history a quick once over and cross-references it with sites on the Quancast top 1000. Using the gender ratio on each site (according to Quancast) it will cobble together an overall percentage of what gender it thinks you are based on those results.
Not surprisingly most of us in the office, including my colleague Erica Ogg, have come up as male, with many tech sites having higher ratios of male users. The tool will give you a complete rundown of all the sites that popped up, along with their respective ratios. It's pretty fun to go through them and see the estimated makeup of each place--you might be surprised.
In case you're worried about your browsing history being used for evil, Nolet insists he's not doing anything with the data. Many users have left their true genders and the tool's guess in the comments below Nolet's post. The general consensus is that if you visit many popular tech sites you'll be pinned under the male persuasion. Visiting some sites with higher female-to-male ratios like TMZ and Livejournal will swing your overall percentage the other direction.
Note: The tool runs a little slow in Internet Explorer, so if you're having problems switch over to Firefox or Opera.
Mozilla's new project called Weave is an exciting new add-on to Mozilla's popular browser Firefox. While in its infancy, the service plans to be a way for users to save and access their personal browsing information across multiple machines. It's a little bit like Google's Web history, del.icio.us, and a Web password saver all wrapped up into one.
Some use cases for Weave (as listed by Mozilla) include: accessing your history and bookmarks from your home version of Firefox on your mobile Firefox browser, shared/collaborative bookmarking, and personalization tools to let you log in and sync up your home bookmarks, plug-ins and passwords on another machine; all things that are typically a pain unless you're technically proficient or know how to plan ahead.
Weave version 0.1, which Mozilla's Labs team rolled out a few weeks back, lays the foundation for Web developers to add Weave integration into their services. It's limited to some very basic back-end tools for developers, although version 0.2 which is planned for "early 2008" is adding a full-blown API, and a user interface complete with settings to let you control how much of your information Weave can access.
Currently, users who want to take advantage of the Weave plug-in must be running the latest beta of Firefox 3, Mozilla's upcoming follow-up to the current version 2.0, which you can grab here.
Hooeey is a new bookmarking and tracking service for your browsing habits. You install a small toolbar in your browser, and it will quietly keep tabs on all your tabs, including which sites you're going to, how long you're staying at each one, and when you're doing it. At the same time, Hooeey adds a social networking layer, letting you share specific sites with others, both on the Hooeey network, and other, larger social bookmarking services like Del.icio.us and Reddit. The goal is to let you centralize your favorites, and make them easier to share with others, while combining some facets of other free tracking services like Google Web History to let you see which services you're visiting the most.
If this entire concept sounds familiar, there's also the now defunct Atten.TV, which recorded people's Web browsing as it happened, so it could be shared with others. An idea we thought was a little too invasive, and apparently users did, too.
So why would you install something like this? The idea behind Hooeey is combining what is usually two separate services into one. The actual tracking function is likely already done in your browser, but in this case is better equated to Google Web History, because your history is stored online instead of your local browser installation. Hooeey also has another leg up on your browser's history file because it works with both platforms, meaning if you're using Internet Explorer and Firefox, your history from both browsers will be recorded in the same space.
Keep an eye on all your activity and tag every place you've gone for easy categorization later.
(Credit: Hooeey.com)To help you track all this data, Hooeey has a built-in analytics service which will break down your browsing habits with all sorts of handy charts and graphs. You can then go in and hand pick whatever sites you want for tagging and sharing. Maybe the most interesting feature to come out of this is the WebTour, which takes your hand-picked links and turns them into slide shows of your links. You can annotate each and rearrange each site's order, as well as theme it with a background feed. The concept is a lot like Diigo's recently launched Webslides feature, although a little less feature-rich.
I'm both fascinated and terrified of this idea, as I'm already pretty freaked out by some of the tracking initiatives popping up on the Web, including YouTube's now watching and public history features. The good news about Hooeey is that there's a decent amount of work involved in setting it up, yet it's really simple to toggle the tracking feature on and off. If you're a Google Web History user looking for a little bit more versatility with your data, Hooeey is definitely worth a look. Considering you can use both services at the same time, it might make for an interesting head-to-head after a month of use.
- prev
- 1
- next
