Slashdot Mirror
Metabrowse Your Web Routine?
AJ-perler asks: "About 2 years ago 'Metabrowsers' were the new hot browsing tools that addressed the trend of users frequently browsing specific sites. Business 2.0 ran an article late 2000 about the problems metabrowser companies faced. I think metabrowsers are interesting and useful, but I haven't seen mention of them for a long time. Do any Slashdot readers use these few that have survived? Is the general public web savvy enough, even today, for this type of browsing?"
For those of you interested in this concept, AJ has provided this list of example "meta-browsing" sites:
- Yodlee.com - Aggregator of your financial web sites.
- QuickBrowse.com($) - Emails web pages to you.
- DailyRoutine.com - Browse a list of web pages."
Having not heard about metabrowsing in two years is probably a good indication that the trend hasn't swept the internet community by storm.
"Moderate drinking can help prevent amputated limbs" -- Abigail Zuger, NYTimes, 12/31/02
See those slashboxes over there? I've got K5, Ars Forums, Brunching Shuttlecocks, E2 and O'Reilly. These are sites that I browse when I've got some free time and something intersting comes up. I know the url's, but I don't have them bookmarked because I get them here on slashdot.
Even the front page hits sites that I occasionally look at. Ny Times, New Scientist, Salon, and a few others. If I played "six degrees of slashdot", most of my favorite sites would only be one or two degrees away from here. Granted, slashdot is a link whore. However I still spend most of my 'non task oriented' browsing on this side of the web.
Just had a thought. Maybe these web aggregators/metabrowsers are missing the boat. I come to slashdot for the content, not the boxes. If I didn't check slashdot daily for the content I wouldn't even look at them. A business model based on screen scraping the web makes me feel like it's 1999 again. You can hardly make money serving up your own content, what makes you think you'll make the bucks with secondhand RDF feeds?
this is essentially how the newspapers do it, you know. you have several companys (reuters, associated press, knight ridder, etc) each has a lot of people on staff to write a lot of things. then they sell the stories to newspapers all over the world. that paper you have in your hand is, if you will, a metabrowser.
but the net doesnt work like that.