Adobe Building Zoetrope, a Web "Time Machine" 133
Khuffie writes "Adobe, along with the University of Washington, are developing Zoetrope, an application that will offer a dynamic new view of the web. It is hard to explain on paper, but you can see a brilliant video of the application in action. Essentially, Zoetrope will allow users to travel back in time through a website, and see how the website gets changed. A user can create lenses on the website, for example, focusing on the price of a DVD at Amazon, and see how the price went up and down over the coming months. More interestingly, you can link lenses together across different websites, and for example, see how the price of gas was affected by say, the aggregated google news result of 'war.'"
Archive.org (Score:3, Insightful)
Sloganeering (Score:5, Insightful)
From the blurb:
More interestingly, you can link lenses together across different websites, and for example, see how the price of gas was affected by say, the aggregated google news result of 'war.'"
Actually, no... You can't use this tool to see how the one thing was affected by the other. You can see how they both changed with respect to time, but that isn't the same.
Please to keep in mind the famous Slashdot Mantra: Correlation is not causation.
Buried on page 2 of TFA: (Score:5, Insightful)
The system is limited, however, by how much historical data is available. To test the tool, the researchers chose 1,000 frequently updated websites and stored information captured every hour over four months.
But for Zoetrope to cover the entire Web would mean capturing huge amounts of data, says Eytan Adar, a PhD student at the University of Washington who was involved with the research. He has investigated the rates at which people tend to check different pages for updates and says that such information could provide insights into how often pages need to be recorded, thereby reducing the amount of data that needs to be stored. "It's impossible to crawl and capture some of these things at the rate at which they're changing," Adar says. "But for something like Zoetrope, it's a smaller percentage of the Web that we want to track. We don't actually need to get every single page that's out there."
To make any money, the Zoetrope people will either have to sell this application to websites or setup their own very limited search engine with ads. And if they go search engine style, they'll have no historical data.
It's a neat idea, but the practical applications are still questionable at best.
About The name (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Archive.org (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Archive.org (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Archive.org (Score:2, Insightful)
No, it will be just like Archive.org but with valuable statistics gathering that I'm sure Adobe will give away for free. /sarcasm
Basically, after having read the article I see this as a tool for creating "Business Intelligence" rather than simple Internet Navel Gazing. I'm sure somewhere at Adobe Prime there are marketing meetings deciding how best to secure and sell this information once it is packaged.
Auto-update (Score:4, Insightful)
Just like Acrobat Reader, the real innovation will be a user interface with options that don't stick, and invasive phone home auto-update technology that is difficult or impossible to switch off. It'll be a time machine allowing you to see just how little Adobe have changed over the years.
Anyone else find this scary? (Score:2, Insightful)
Skeptical... (Score:4, Insightful)
The presented features do look nifty, especially the graph, but one big problem I see is that the timespans it can process will likely end up rather short. Webpage design changes over time and when that happens lensing will get troublesome, since content might no longer be where it used to be. Also the tool only seems to work on portal pages, while most real content is hidden in some sub page, which naturally doesn't have much of a history.
Re:I feel like... (Score:1, Insightful)
come now, pam anderson always embodied the pornstar look, never the girl next door look
Like diff... for the web (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Buried on page 2 of TFA: (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Sloganeering (Score:5, Insightful)
Please bear in mind the slightly less pithy, but more useful version:
Correlation is not necessarilycausation.
Re:Archive.org (Score:3, Insightful)
Guess they haven't heard of the Wayback Machine [archive.org].
Well except for the fact The Archive now retroactively obeys robots.txt [archive.org] made it all but worthless the last half dozen times I was there.
Re:Auto-update (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't forget the hideous bloat and geometrically increasing load times with each successive versions.
The Acrobat Reader was a bizarre creature. The first couple versions were almost unusably bad, then they finally got it right around version 4, and each successive version has been bigger, slower and less useful (even if it supported more features). Like Windows 2000, Office 97, and the old /. user homepages... something that actually worked really well but was ruined by the relentless, mindless drive to Add More Stuff.
I could never figure out how software developers can make a program that does something simple quickly, and then add a ton of features and end up with a version that is 10 times slower to do the exact same simple thing it used to do quickly. Moore's Law has created a generation of retarded programmers.
Re:About The name (Score:1, Insightful)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoetrope [wikipedia.org]
It's actually quite a fitting word to describe what they have designed.
Re:Buried on page 2 of TFA: (Score:3, Insightful)
So every mistake made on their website ever is kept around? Mmm, I have a feeling website owners won't be as happy about it as you think.
Is it really that hard? (Score:3, Insightful)
Looks pretty cool, though.