hooeey blog

hooeey was included in a list of 13 Great Tools For Organizing the Web compiled by Mashable . Everyone knows that the web is an indispensable part of our lives and that we are conducting a large part of our professional and personal life on the web. How does one keep track of all this activity? How does one bring in order to one’s web browsing? Mashable’s Sean P. Aune has compiled a list of thirteen tools, very helpfully broken up by category, to help do this.

History

“While some people are obsessive about deleting their surfing history, others will find a complete version essential to their research (such as Mashable writers). Hooeey will track your surfing history from any browser, on any computer, so if you surf from work and home, you will have a complete, and merged, history. For a more complete view of its features, you can see our original review here.”

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Highlighters

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Visual

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Some of the initiatives in the area of web browser history have been quietly unfolding over the last few months. The major initiatives are:

(1) Google’s Web History that now uses the Google Toolbar and has expanded beyond search history

(2) Mozilla Weave that pushes browser metadata such as bookmarks, history and customizations into “a cloud”.

What are the other major players doing? Microsoft is developing SearchBar, a system for “proactively and persistently storing query histories, browsing histories, and users’ notes and ratings in an interrelated fashion”.

On the startup front, several services and tools have begun to appear:

(1) Thumbstrips, (surprisingly, from Intuit) a Firefox extension that keeps thumbnails of your browsing history

(2) Trailfire, which creates a sequence based on your browsing which can then be shared

(3) Deja Clicks, a web recording utility for Firefox

There are quite a few Firefox extensions that have their own take on book marking and browser history recording. A quick browse through the Firefox Add-ons bookmarks category show many useful plug-ins.

TechCrunch has recently covered a YCombinator start-up called WebMynd which provides a service Firefox add-on that records every website you visit and saves a virtual copy on your hard drive. Interestingly, this is the first instance of a paid book marking/browser history storing service.

So what does all this mean? It simply points to the fact that browsing and information seeking is more integral to people’s lives today and there are opportunities to make one’s browsing more productive and personal. Remember, browsing history recording is not new—there were some services that were around in 1998-2000 that did just about the same. The key difference is that the world is more ready for these services today and we may well find the tipping point in 2008.