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I use Google Bookmarks: http://www.google.com/bookmarks http://www.google.com/bookmarks It already merges my personal "Web History" (things I search for on Goo

by buro9 16y ago

I use Google Bookmarks: http://www.google.com/bookmarks http://www.google.com/bookmarks It already merges my personal "Web History" (things I search for on Google) with my actual bookmarks (things I click 'bookmark' on a bookmarklet - http://www.google.com/support/chrome/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=100215 http://www.google.com/support/chrome/bin/answer.py?hl=en&#38... ). The key feature of Google bookmarks is that searching the bookmarks always searches the content of all bookmarked pages and the web history pages. It returns the results with bookmarked pages at the top, and web history below. It also has tags (they call them labels) and collections (they call them lists), and collections are shareable, and tags are searchable (find X only in Erlang tagged bookmarks). You can import bookmarks from other services, and export all bookmarks to XML (one of the reasons I stay with Google is that they allow me to move). My question to you is: What do you offer that trumps that functionality that I already have? Why should I move? Snowman?

StavrosK 16y ago
Well, the snowman is pretty awesome... There are other features, such as the ability to share bookmarks on your personal site (http://stavros.historio.us/ http://stavros.historio.us/) for an example, automatically add things to "read later", one-click bookmarking, automatic sharing... A few features that are coming are the ability to import RSS feeds from other places, as well as more social elements (and, of course, support). For you, though, David, I'll throw in a free subscription!
- buro9 16y ago
  Actually... I've just tried your site end-to-end and you do have a killer feature and it's not the thing you are making most prominent. The killer feature is the cache. To know that what I bookmark will have a snapshot at that moment in time, citable and impervious to changes that happen to the source. That is a fantastic feature. My advice to you would be to highlight that. Bookmarks against things that can and will change, disappear or move are moving targets... what you're offering here is a permanent bookmark as it stood at that moment in time. That's a big deal, definitely enough to make me consider trying it out. But you need to communicate that this is possible... it would really help researchers and those who use bookmarks as a searchable source over a long period of time (which is when the effects of things changing becomes most obvious). I think you should possibly look at features like verifying a source (it looks like you cache from the browser, which the user could've modified) and allowing tags to be shared with other users or publicly. Basically... allow academics to use this and to include web citations in their papers and such with histori.us providing the verified cache. Perhaps even extend the bookmarking functionality to include the ability to highlight and add notes to part of the bookmarked page. Permanent cache = big deal.
  - StavrosK 16y ago
    Ah, thanks for that, you're right in that we don't publicise it almost at all (and we should). As for the sharing, you have your personal historious at: http://buro9.historio.us/search/ http://buro9.historio.us/search/ You can publish sites there (including tags) and refer people to it by giving them a link of the form http://buro9.historio.us/?q=some+query http://buro9.historio.us/?q=some+query. Personally, I think that's pretty handy for answering the question "do you have any sites about X?" No items are made public by default, but do note that, when you do make an item public, you are also sharing the cached version. Thanks again for the feedback, and I'm good for that free subscription if you need it!
    - buro9 16y ago
      I've thought about it some more. Beware and embrace the slashdotting (insert digg, reddit, HN here). The cache is both your killer feature and your risk. I hope it's statically stored or can be put in memory quickly... are you using Varnish? Encourage it's use... if people are bookmarking using histori.us and a site goes down, you've just gained a very large audience to your service. But only if your site survives the onslaught itself.
      - StavrosK 16y ago
        We are using Varnish, but we're storing the sources in the DB (to take advantage of automatic compression and all-around ease). It's trivial to get Varnish to cache the entire source and invalidate the cache when the document changes (the public/private setting, basically, so it doesn't accidentally share a page that's been changed to private), so that's all good. The biggest problem (by far) is disk usage. The rest of the service is very easily sharded, really, as every user is isolated. Solr is also fantastic (much better than Sphinx, in hindsight we should have gone with that for TP), so that can also scale very well (there's even an implementation of it on hadoop). We'll add the caching feature to the front page as soon as we finish the current round of A/B testing, thanks again (that feature was basically an afterthought, so it was great that you noted its importance)!

by buro9 16y ago

StavrosK 16y ago

Well, the snowman is pretty awesome... There are other features, such as the ability to share bookmarks on your personal site (http://stavros.historio.us/ http://stavros.historio.us/) for an example, automatically add things to "read later", one-click bookmarking, automatic sharing... A few features that are coming are the ability to import RSS feeds from other places, as well as more social elements (and, of course, support). For you, though, David, I'll throw in a free subscription!

buro9 16y ago
Actually... I've just tried your site end-to-end and you do have a killer feature and it's not the thing you are making most prominent. The killer feature is the cache. To know that what I bookmark will have a snapshot at that moment in time, citable and impervious to changes that happen to the source. That is a fantastic feature. My advice to you would be to highlight that. Bookmarks against things that can and will change, disappear or move are moving targets... what you're offering here is a permanent bookmark as it stood at that moment in time. That's a big deal, definitely enough to make me consider trying it out. But you need to communicate that this is possible... it would really help researchers and those who use bookmarks as a searchable source over a long period of time (which is when the effects of things changing becomes most obvious). I think you should possibly look at features like verifying a source (it looks like you cache from the browser, which the user could've modified) and allowing tags to be shared with other users or publicly. Basically... allow academics to use this and to include web citations in their papers and such with histori.us providing the verified cache. Perhaps even extend the bookmarking functionality to include the ability to highlight and add notes to part of the bookmarked page. Permanent cache = big deal.
- StavrosK 16y ago
  Ah, thanks for that, you're right in that we don't publicise it almost at all (and we should). As for the sharing, you have your personal historious at: http://buro9.historio.us/search/ http://buro9.historio.us/search/ You can publish sites there (including tags) and refer people to it by giving them a link of the form http://buro9.historio.us/?q=some+query http://buro9.historio.us/?q=some+query. Personally, I think that's pretty handy for answering the question "do you have any sites about X?" No items are made public by default, but do note that, when you do make an item public, you are also sharing the cached version. Thanks again for the feedback, and I'm good for that free subscription if you need it!
  - buro9 16y ago
    I've thought about it some more. Beware and embrace the slashdotting (insert digg, reddit, HN here). The cache is both your killer feature and your risk. I hope it's statically stored or can be put in memory quickly... are you using Varnish? Encourage it's use... if people are bookmarking using histori.us and a site goes down, you've just gained a very large audience to your service. But only if your site survives the onslaught itself.
    - StavrosK 16y ago
      We are using Varnish, but we're storing the sources in the DB (to take advantage of automatic compression and all-around ease). It's trivial to get Varnish to cache the entire source and invalidate the cache when the document changes (the public/private setting, basically, so it doesn't accidentally share a page that's been changed to private), so that's all good. The biggest problem (by far) is disk usage. The rest of the service is very easily sharded, really, as every user is isolated. Solr is also fantastic (much better than Sphinx, in hindsight we should have gone with that for TP), so that can also scale very well (there's even an implementation of it on hadoop). We'll add the caching feature to the front page as soon as we finish the current round of A/B testing, thanks again (that feature was basically an afterthought, so it was great that you noted its importance)!