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PARC's Popout Prism Aids Web Navigation
sulo writes "Popout Prism is a Web Browser that reduces the amount of time users end looking for information in Web pages. By creating visual "popouts" that emphasize critical elements in Web pages, Popout Prism draws users' attention to the right information." Not a very complicated idea, but one that could be useful.
Did you actually check out what popup prism does, or watch the accompanying video? Please actually visit the posted links before posting some uninformed gut reaction. Moderators, this goes double for you.
It's pretty hard to hijack a more visual version of "Find Text In Page" for the purposes of advertising.
The user has to type their own keywords, and that is what's being highlighted, and it's only highlighted in the preview pane and on the normal pane while the user holds the mouse button down in the preview pane (to aid transitioning from the preview to the main text).
Using this for advertising would be pretty much impossible. What, are the ads going to hypnotise us into typing the keywords of their ad into our "Find Text In Page" textbox, then get us to hold down the mouse button in the preview pane so that the words in the ad show up larger? Come on.
Not only that, but this doesn't use any more bandwidth at all either, as it is a nice, fairly simple, though well thought out, client-side feature of the user's web browser.