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"Volunia", the search engine he worked on a couple years ago, was... peculiar. The marketing point was that whenever you browsed you were able to chat with othe
by riquito 12y ago
"Volunia", the search engine he worked on a couple years ago, was... peculiar. The marketing point was that whenever you browsed you were able to chat with other people viewing the same site. How did they achieve that? Clicking a link in Volunia would open the desired site in a fullscreen iframe.
The result was that
1) you would end up on white pages for any site that blocked iframe access
2) you would loose the navigation bar, since the domain was stuck to Volunia.com
3) they were able to see your whole navigation history since you were browsing inside their iframe.
In a second iteration they proposed a Firefox extension to avoid the above problems but... who would install an extension to use a search engine? How could you explain it to non savvy users?
A positive thing was the SimCity like interface (you could see a site like a building linked by roads to other buildings). That was funny at first, yet I can't remember what they wanted to achieve with that.
- gone35 12y agoThe execution was frankly abhorrent to say the least; and I personally couldn't care less about all that gimmicky 'social' cruft; but, having just watched a demo of the thing [1], I must say I'm having a slight mini Xerox Parc-ish feeling about the map navigation stuff, which is after all a key part of Marchiori's original vision [2]. Paraphrasing an earlier reviewer [3], I feel this guy is definitely onto something here... [1] Starts at 0:51: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2Mxlb-Gqhs&t=0m51s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2Mxlb-Gqhs&t=0m51s [2] http://www.math.unipd.it/~massimo/2012/left-volunia http://www.math.unipd.it/~massimo/2012/left-volunia [3] http://searchengineland.com/volunia-a-social-search-engine-says-the-web-has-come-alive-110462 http://searchengineland.com/volunia-a-social-search-engine-s...