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Adobe Building Zoetrope, a Web "Time Machine"

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the data-lovers-unite dept.

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.'"

23 of 133 comments (clear)

  1. I feel like... by Facegarden · · Score: 4, Funny

    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?
    1. Re:I feel like... by DeadDecoy · · Score: 5, Funny

      That's awesome. You could see the internet before: goatse, tub girl, and 2-girls on cup. Think of all the things you could un-watch!
      Hell, I could un-rick-roll myself, thereby destroying that meme forever!

    2. Re:I feel like... by bennomatic · · Score: 4, Funny

      O god... watching Pam Anderson change from the pretty girl-next-door to monster of modern science she is.

      --
      The CB App. What's your 20?
    3. Re:I feel like... by hal2814 · · 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.

    4. Re:I feel like... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

      You've just postulated the endless goatse loop!

  2. it can see into the future! by Digitus1337 · · Score: 4, 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!

  3. Archive.org by chonglibloodsport · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Guess they haven't heard of the Wayback Machine.

    1. Re:Archive.org by timeOday · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I think the whole point of this is the analysis capability. It's not just snapshots of old web pages. For that matter it might use archive.org as its data source.

    2. Re:Archive.org by Justin+Hopewell · · Score: 5, Informative

      From the article: "Kris Carpenter, who directs efforts to record Web pages at the Internet Archive, is enthusiastic about the new tool. "This is a fantastic leap forward," she says, adding that Zoetrope could be used as a stand-alone application or eventually become part of the browser. "The advances of the interface are phenomenal in terms of being able to navigate data in a very different way and associate it across websites," Carpenter says. "I think most users have an interest in trying to connect the dots between different sources of information, but there are almost no tools available to make that an easy thing to do." She adds that the Internet Archive is interested in sharing its data with the Zoetrope researchers."

    3. Re:Archive.org by Toonol · · Score: 5, Funny

      Use the wayback machine to visit it before it started retroactively honoring robots.txt.

  4. Sloganeering by Anonymous Coward · · 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.

    1. Re:Sloganeering by Angostura · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Please to keep in mind the famous Slashdot Mantra: Correlation is not causation.

      Please bear in mind the slightly less pithy, but more useful version:

      Correlation is not necessarilycausation.

    2. Re:Sloganeering by ceoyoyo · · Score: 4, Funny

      Or the completely accurate but much less trite version:

      Correlation implies either causation or mutual causation by a third factor.

    3. Re:Sloganeering by DragonWriter · · Score: 4, Informative

      Or the completely accurate but much less trite version:

      Correlation implies either causation or mutual causation by a third factor.

      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.

  5. Buried on page 2 of TFA: by TubeSteak · · Score: 4, 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.

    --
    [Fuck Beta]
    o0t!
    1. Re:Buried on page 2 of TFA: by A+beautiful+mind · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I can see this working if the websites offer a way through a standardized API to share this information. Then support becomes the problem of the website. If this thing catches on, it would be the best interest of website owners to support it and the users would love it. This is similar in concept to a more complex version of RSS support.

      --
      It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
      Be yourself no matter what they say
  6. About The name by syngularyx · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Zoetrope sucks

  7. Re:Just so we're on the same page by sexconker · · Score: 4, Funny

    Oh please. Clearly Adobe, Google, Microsoft, etc. don't have to pay attention to that. Information wants to be free!

  8. Auto-update by syousef · · Score: 3, 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.

    --
    These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
    1. Re:Auto-update by ConceptJunkie · · Score: 3, 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.

      --
      You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
  9. Skeptical... by grumbel · · Score: 3, 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.

  10. cliches in the digital age by mblase · · Score: 3, 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....

  11. See prices go up and down in the COMING months?!? by noidentity · · Score: 4, Funny

    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

    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...