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.'"
I feel like... (Score:5, Funny)
I feel like there is a porn joke in here somewhere...
-Taylor
Re:I feel like... (Score:5, Funny)
Hell, I could un-rick-roll myself, thereby destroying that meme forever!
Re:I feel like... (Score:5, Funny)
I don't think that's such a good idea. Un-goatse yourself now and next thing you know you'll be clicking through a lively discussion, see a good point with a reference so some "goatse" site (probably some sort of wiki), click the link, and then NOOOOOOO!!!! There's the goatse all over again.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
You've just postulated the endless goatse loop!
Nerd Mashup! (Score:3, Funny)
Someone photomorph tubgirl with a Klein bottle.
Re: UnRickRoll! (Score:2)
"Be careful what you wish for. The Internet might grant it." Modern Chinese Curse.
UnRickRoll
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aD4bn5pp32w [youtube.com]
Goatse SFW (at least top level)
http://web.archive.org/web/20070806010246/http://www.goatse.cx/ [archive.org]
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only if I can go back and hit the big red button.
Re:I feel like... (Score:5, Funny)
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come now, pam anderson always embodied the pornstar look, never the girl next door look
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You must not be old enough to remember when she was the Labatt's Blue Zone Girl [photobucket.com]
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You're thinking of Britney Spears. Pamela Anderson has always been skanky. Britney was actually pretty cute before the devil took his payment.
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Actually, PA was very cute back in the day, when she was a Labatt's Blue Girl from Comox, BC. She had this wholesome beer babe thing going on. All the plastic surgery and stuff came later.
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Weird Science! Weird Science!
She's my creation.... nm
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Screw that. FTS, emphasis mine:
Not only can we use Zoetrope to view the past versions, we can apparently use it to see the future versions. Wait until I create a lens on some stock-tracking site... I'll be rich enough to pay for Pam to have all he
it can see into the future! (Score:5, Funny)
. . . and see how the price went up and down over the coming months.
This is all I need to make the change from more traditional investments to a DVD-based retirement plan!
Archive.org (Score:3, Insightful)
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+1 Sinatra! (Score:2, Funny)
You did it your way.
Re:Archive.org (Score:5, Insightful)
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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.
Re:Archive.org (Score:5, Informative)
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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.
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Yep, this is a damn shame. Add this to IA's general flakiness and you will learn to _always_ save a local copy of an IA page if you care about it, it may not be there the next time...
Re:Archive.org (Score:5, Funny)
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It's always retroactively obeyed robots.txt, Brewster's first rule is don't get sued.
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They must obey. Everything related to search and archiving better obey the robots.txt. Especially Archive.org type sites.
Do you know how many real life problems that kind of non obeying engines created and keeps creating? robots.txt is there for a reason, even at this site ( slashot.org/robots.txt )
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It makes you wonder if it was adobe who actually collected all the retrospective data that is driving their new 'machine' !
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Other projects, such as the Internet Archive, already preserve historical versions of websites. But Mira Dontcheva, a research scientist in the Advanced Technologies Lab at Adobe Systems, where Zoetrope was developed, says the new tool makes it much easier to browse through this kind of data. "Having access to temporal information can help us come up with more compelling stories of what's going on around us," she says.
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Sounds like a gimmick taped onto the wayback machine, or any other internet archive, to me.
There's no indication to suggest Adobe's web cache will be any better or worse than what we've seen in other internet archives.
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Sometimes a gimmick is the difference between something being a major pain in the ass to use and a useful tool, though. Simple user interface improvements can be key, and the wayback machine has a pretty terrible UI (as in, it's very difficult to quickly see how something has changed over days/weeks/months without many, many clicks).
I, for one, would definitely use this to assist with data scraping, which is some
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.
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And the "Post hoc, ergo propter hoc" fallacy.
The value of this ability to link views is going to be pretty minimal at first unless they plan on pulling data from sites like www.archive.org, since an application like this relies on having the archived data to be able to show the changes over time, and without linking into or hoovering an existing internet archive, they'll never be able to take you back earlier than they first started saving websites. But over time it will get more valuable.
Re:Sloganeering (Score:5, Insightful)
Please bear in mind the slightly less pithy, but more useful version:
Correlation is not necessarilycausation.
Re:Sloganeering (Score:5, Funny)
Or the completely accurate but much less trite version:
Correlation implies either causation or mutual causation by a third factor.
Re:Sloganeering (Score:5, Informative)
That's not completely accurate. The completely accurate form is:
Degree of correlation implies a certain probability of some causal link (either direct or through a shared cause.)
Its quite possible for corresponding values from two completely unrelated sequences to show some degree of correlation, after all. If I have two sequences whose corresponding (e.g., by time) values lok like this:
S1: 1 1 2 3 4 3 2 1 1
S2: 2 2 3 4 5 4 3 2 2
I certainly might suspect that there is a tight correlation between S1 and S2, but each of them could just be random integers chosen from the range 1 to 6, inclusive. Using statistics, I can say how unlikely that coincidence is, but that doesn't mean that I can simply state as a fact that there is a causal link because there is a correlation.
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Or we could be completely accurate and succinct:non-correlation proves non-causality.
Now, what was this about, again?
Actually that's wrong (Score:2)
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I was actually thinking about this while taking my shower this morning (the place where I do my second-best thinking). I felt uneasy about my assertion; it's obviously glib, and I'm not even sure it's intuitively appealing. I'm not mathematically inclined, so I was trying to analyze it in logical terms.
The assertion I so flippantly made could be expressed as Non-correlation between two series of events proves they are not causally related.. To prove this logically false requires only a single counter-exampl
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I should have specified: "correlation" implies an ACTUAL correlation.
We can only ever establish to a certain (often arbitrarily small) probability that an actual correlation exists.
In your example, if the two number sequences are just random integers, then they are not actually correlated, no matter how much they may appear to be so.
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I believe the correct form is this:
They might be related, but you won't know for sure until you get off your arse and do the numbers.
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No, correlation is never causation.
Sometimes correlation is due to causation, but they aren't ever the same thing.
Re: Your sig. (Score:1)
If anyone knows why my comments recently started appearing with score 1, despite "Excellent" karma, I'd love to hear.
I set "Karma Bonus" to 0, since IMO, it's tantamount to "Consistent Group-think Bonus," thus not deserving any bonus. Perhaps you forgot that you had the same insight and had removed this bias from your configuration.
(Pro-tip: Likewise, setting Troll & Flamebait to +1 exposes far more moderation abuse than genuine trolls & flames, since (for example) at least one positive moderation is required to display these comments with threshold >=1.)
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zoetrope, eh? (Score:2)
at first, I thought AlphaChrome [wikipedia.org] was back.
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.
"practical applications are still questionable" (Score:1)
"practical applications are still questionable at best."
Funny, I heard the same thing about Livejournal, Facebook, and later, Twitter.
Now each of those are worth hundreds of millions, and are used by hundreds of millions of people. "Practical" isn't a neccessary prerequisite for success.
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Worth? No. Neither is Facebook. They are only worth something to the executives who run those sites -- IF they get bought by some foolish large corporation. It was foolish to buy them 2 years ago, and it would be certifiably insane to do so in the current economic climate. These sites are only a means to advertise to a specific (gullible, obviously) demographic. They are just billboards in cyberspace.
Re:Buried on page 2 of TFA: (Score:4, Insightful)
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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.
About The name (Score:3, Insightful)
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Actually, zoetrope [reference.com] is descriptive and apt.
It sure does and it's taken. (Score:2, Informative)
Let the lawsuits fly!
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoetrope [wikipedia.org]
It's actually quite a fitting word to describe what they have designed.
Very few supported sites (Score:1)
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.
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.
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Phone home? Professional software right? The Photoshop which everyone pirates for example?
Adobe software have always checked for updates and these days which giving a pdf link became common and people finding amazing issues, they better check without "phoning home".
I mean the Adobe Reader, Adobe Flash, Air type end user "player" stuff. They are way less invasive than lately introduced, OS X Admin (OS X root) running Google "updaters" buried in near all Google apps. At least Adobe Updater hits net, reads if
Anyone else find this scary? (Score:2, Insightful)
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The power of the Internet to retain acts, deeds, and knowledge for so long is disturbing to me. There are Usenet posts I made 10 years ago that will never go away.
No, i really don't find it scary. Probably just because i have grown up with it, but i know i have forum posts that have been around almost as many years and i don't really care. I think people are adjusting to the idea that this stuff can be permanent, and just changing their behavior accordingly.
-Taylor
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Anyone else find this scary?
I used to; not anymore. Social-net sites like MySpace are filled with people who are ignorant to, or genuinely don't care about, the ramifications of not just putting any/every aspect of their lives online, but tying it to personal identifiers ("a/s/l," real name, phone numbers). These high-quality targets for exploitation overshadow the online historic profiles of those with the foresight to use one or more pseudonyms and limit the amount of personal info they associate with their pseudonym(s).
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.
cliches in the digital age (Score:4, Funny)
It is hard to explain on paper,
...which is okay, since neither one of us is using any.
Always makes me wonder: when was the last time anybody actually "dialed" a phone? And someday kids will wonder why it's called "YouTube" when they've only ever watched it on a thin, flat LCD screen....
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They may already not be very familiar with cathode ray tubes. But never fear... Ted Stephens "a series of tubes" should last for a very, very, very long time. At least here, if nowhere else.
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My inner pedant would assert that "dial" doesn't mean what you think it means. Meaning comes from usage; etymology just tries to make some sense of it.
But whatever, I'll play along: Actually, I have a rotary phone still hooked up. I almost never use it. In fact, I put it in a guest room. I find it funny (but I'm not sure if my guests do). I do test it from time to time to make sure the network where I live will still handle pulse dialing; surprisingly it will. So I've "dialed" a phone (in the sense y
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As of about two years ago, my next door neighbor was still using the rotary phone that she had originally rented from AT&T.
For all I know, she still is.
Like diff... for the web (Score:3, Insightful)
Pointless (Score:1)
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IMHO Flash has its place, especially after Air and recent developments which makes me believe it is heading to be an open standard. Especially Flash Lite on mobile devices, if becomes free for manufacturers.
If we call it pointless what about the "me too" things like SilverLight and more recently, Java FX?
Especially the SilverLight developer makes Adobe look like an angel.
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More useful applications (Score:2)
It was reported by a few outlets that Obama's website changed a lot during the political campaign. It would be an interesting application of this technology, to keep a watch on political websites.
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It was reported by a few outlets that Obama's website changed a lot during the political campaign. It would be an interesting application of this technology, to keep a watch on political websites.
Well, I mean..... that was kind of his entire platform :-P
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I agree! His platform did contain a well-outlined and comprehensively defined 'change' in many aspects of US Government.
See prices go up and down in the COMING months?!? (Score:5, Funny)
1. See how the price of a stock "went" up and down over the coming months.
2. ???
3. Profit!!!
Any ideas on step 2? It's escaping me at the moment...
Re:See prices go up and down in the COMING months? (Score:2)
I believe it's "buy low, sell high" or somesuch.
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And we trust Adobe to do this? (Score:2)
And we trust Adobe to implement this in a non-threatening for-the-greater-good socialistic sorta way?
I don't think so....
Correlation does not imply causation (Score:1)
Wow (Score:3, Interesting)
The tool looks really REALLY powerful. They really need to change it so it can be more easily used by the noob though. I would even suggest that the links showing trends can be linked to. That way if you want to make a point in a debate you can point someone to your lensed construct. Or there can be sites that will list interesting correlations like in blogs or w/e. Here it would be VERY useful. If they make it a web-based system with no download it would be much much more powerful again. The only big problem I see is the implementation. Gathering so much info is hard not impossible but! following information as sites move and evolve will be impossible. I think they will need to be able to grab historical data as will as a sites own history... for example instead of linking to your own graph allow linking to google stocks or google trends. A lot of those reach back to the 70s which is more useful than the last 8mnths.
What's in a name (Score:1)
I wonder how Francis Ford Coppola feels about this?
http://www.zoetrope.com/about.cgi [zoetrope.com]
http://www.all-story.com/ [all-story.com]
I know this is my (Mr. Hyde) lit-geek side talking, but I thought he nearly owned that word.
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Real time machine! (Score:1)
focusing on the price of a DVD at Amazon, and see how the price went up and down over the coming months.
Wow, I can see how the price of a product varied in the future? Wonder if it works with the stock exchange or gambling...
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Can the International Date Line help?
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No man, the International Date Line will never help. First of all it's a darn 900 number, so the fees are outrageous, and it still did not help me find a date (neither a local one, nor a International date). I think it is a scam. ;D
UI (Score:1)
Is it really that hard? (Score:3, Insightful)
Looks pretty cool, though.
Where is the data coming from? (Score:2)
The problem is...who is storing the data?
Is that a WebArchive with 20 seconds resolution? How much data would that yield?
Or do I have to tag some website for a day before I can see that?
Or is there a P2P solution (like with content addressing DHT?) for that?
Does it work (Score:2)
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Very giant piece of commercial crapware (Score:1)
Re:Just so we're on the same page (Score:5, Funny)
Oh please. Clearly Adobe, Google, Microsoft, etc. don't have to pay attention to that. Information wants to be free!
Re: another ... (Score:3, Funny)
Followed by Microsoft announcing "Tropz"!