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Adobe Building Zoetrope, a Web "Time Machine"
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 there is a porn joke in here somewhere...
-Taylor
Worldwide Military budgets: $2100 billion. Worldwide Space Exploration budgets: $38 billion. Really, world? Really?
. . . 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!
Guess they haven't heard of the Wayback Machine.
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.
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.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Zoetrope sucks
Oh please. Clearly Adobe, Google, Microsoft, etc. don't have to pay attention to that. Information wants to be free!
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.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Let the lawsuits fly!
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.
-- http://ninthagenda.com/
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.
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....
Or like Versionista. http://versionista.com/diff/rnk5Hkwm9Fw!o5RC64S1rQ/?showscript.
We always knew Comcast was corrupt, here's the proof: http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1909890&cid=34545432
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...
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.
Someone photomorph tubgirl with a Klein bottle.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Followed by Microsoft announcing "Tropz"!
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I think it's only hard to explain "on paper" if you insist on using nonsensical phrases like "will allow users to travel back in time through a website". How hard is it to just say "will show website changes over time"?
Looks pretty cool, though.
sic transit gloria mundi