Global History Browser Part 2: TrailBlazer and Onfolio
Posted on June 8th, 2004
Last November I wrote about the idea of a global history for web browsing that would be more comprehensive than what we've got now. What we've got is what we've always had-- titles of web pages visited in the recent past with little or no recollection of sequence, page value, or page content.
I've made a little progress with this idea on my own, but I see some other people have been looking at it too. Today I found out about TrailBlazer, an OS X web browser that pumps up the browser history with thumbnails, graphical tree diagrams, content searching with Lucene, and other interesting stuff. The TrailBlazer introduction video (16M) shows the application in action. And to quote the site:
Our software solution provides the user with a graphical representation of the steps they took from page to page, such that they can simply click to their final destination page.
The trouble with TrailBlazer is that requires OS X. Which in turn implies that it's location-dependent: you have to be sitting in front of the computer that has TrailBlazer installed in order to take advantage of its abilities. The same is true for a Onfolio, which Jeremy Allaire mentioned back in March. Onfolio looks to be big on drag and drop, which is great. But it also presumes a Windows desktop environment, which isn't so great. It still restricts you to one desktop.
With both these programs, if you're not at the computer that has the application installed it's too bad for you. Your data-- in this case, the information about the pages you've gone to and the things you've seen-- is wrapped inside an application that probably (I can't really say, not having used either product) limits and dictates your options in terms of how you can get at it and what you can do with it.
The solution I have in mind is more of a service than an application. You connect to it only when you need it, and it requests the pages you're interested in on your behalf so it can both display the page and save a copy behind the scenes. Both the service and the data it stores are independent of the browser. In exchange for this independence you do have to give up some of the fringe benefits that TrailBlazer and Onfolio offer, like on-the-fly text searches and drag and drop convenience.
I've started programming my idea, but it's still in the early stages. Hopefully I'll be releasing something later this summer. If you've got any burning ideas about what would make a global history service useful, though, send them my way...