hooeey blog

Yesterday we went to our first official sponsoring event R. V. College of Engineering at the on Mysore Road in Bangalore.

The college students organize a two day fest once a year called Infinity Fest. The objective of a college fest is to provide a platform for students to showcase their skills. It not only brings out the talent of the participants, but also the organizing and managerial skills of the organizers, and an opportunity for the industry and the students to interact.

Beside sponsors like Yahoo! India, Thought works, Unisys, BINGO!, i2 - Supply Chain Results Company and a few others, hooeey looked quite serious and almost like the big ones .

Stay tuned, hooeey on events will be continued.

On the 24th of October hooeey was choosen as the website of the day within a Russian Newspaper Vedomosti. Which is a project by Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal, who joined their efforts to bring it to life. Together with the largest Russian publishing house Independent Media, they have been publishing Vedomosti since 1999. Vedomosti sees its mission in providing readers with timely, detailed and objective coverage.

Here is a ‘try’ for a translation to english with the help of Google’s language tool, which is in beta right now. But at least I got a sense of the article. I did some adjustments so get a readable text.

Today’s internet service enthusiasts should like to analyze their own online behavior. Do you know, which time of day you use the Internet most often, how much time you spend, and what websites you usually visit? These questions are answered by the following web application, named hooeey. The main focus is not to collect data only for statistic it has more features.

To begin, you need to download a browser toolbar (Internet Explorer and Firefox) which will monitor all sites that you visit. The browser does almost the same thing, but hooeey has much more functions. Visited sites can be assessed on a five-point scale, tagged which make them easier re-findable and the web-browse-history is web-based therefore portable. This is interesting for those who work on different computers they need to have a dashboard accessible on all PCs.

You wanted to go back to a prior visited site, but the address of it is wiped off from the head? Right now it is not working. With hooeey it is enough to remember the date and approximate time when you visited it.

The hooeey team is based in Bangalore - Indians Sillicon Valley. Last Saturday was one of the major festivals called Ayudha Puja which we celebrated in our office. How & why to celebrate a Puja: In Karnataka, Ayudha Puja, is celebrated with the worship of implements used in daily life such as computers, books, vehicles, kitchen tools etc. Basically it includes all tools that help one earn one’s livelihood. So knowledge workers go for books, pen or computers, plough and other agricultural tools by the farmer, machinery by industrialists and cars/buses/trucks by transporters are decorated with flowers and worshiped on this day invoking God’s blessing for success in coming years. It is believed that any new venture such as starting of business or purchasing of new household items on this day is bound to succeed. Well, that has yet to be proved. Well here is a photo of on computer and hooeey after the puja decorated with flowers.

Tara, painted a beautiful rangoli in front of our office building and the entire office was decorated with banana palm leafs and flowers. Nice day!

Nice to watch the blogosphere working and distributing the message about hooeey and its major features:

record - retrieve - analyze

On the downloadsquad blog you find an article saying ‘Track your browsing history with hooeey’ and share the links with your friends easily. hooeey also caught attention in Germany as an entry in a web2.0 directory.

hooeey in Russia

Is described as a centralized history repository which is used as a basis for decent services such as bookmarking, sharing, rating, tagging, analyzing and cross posting URLs on other bookmarking platforms.

hooeey in China

hooeey is a new bookmarking and tracking service for your browsing habits. You install a small toolbar in your browser, and it will quietly keep tack on all your tabs, including which sites you’re going to, how long you’re staying at each one, and when you’re doing it. At the same time, hooeey adds a social networking layer, letting you share specific sites with others, both on the hooeey network, and other, larger social bookmarking services like Del.icio.us and Reddit. The goal is to let you centralize your favorites, and make them easier to share with others, while combining some facets of other free tracking services like Google Web History to let you see which services you’re visiting the most.

hooeey in Japan

View of Browser history tracking and sharing “hooeey” By a browser visited web pages can be managed. They can also be shared with friends. There are browser add-ins available. It is a very convenient service to use.

hooeey in Spain

Many of us would like a small statistic with the web visits and more time spent on them in order to organize well and use the time, in addition to having an orderly manner to access these favorite websites. For this purpose, hooeey provides as a good site and extension for Firefox and Explorer.

hooeey in Italy with the Title:

Keep track of all the sites you visit and share them, if you want to, with other users.

One year ago when we first launched hooeey was mentioned on startups India. The new revised version is mentioned on killerstartups. They describe it as Hooeey is an application that is like a history manager, search engine, and bookmarking application all in one.

Jane’s E-Learning Pick of the Day on October 19, 2007 was hooeey . And on delicious, the hooeey homepage is already tagged by 49 people. A very overview gives this article on techmixer.

Yesterday, the first blogger picked up on hooeey and its offered services. Under the title ‘Hooeey is a Less Scary Version of Slife‘ a post on mashable.com was published. The article describes hooeey in a compact and short way. The webware blog has already chosen a title which describes hooeey the shortes way ‘De.licio.us + Google Web History = Hooeey’. Considering the title it is obvious that the question: “How does hooeey differ from Google web history?” comes up. While writing hooeeys FAQs we included this particular question already, here is the answer:

Google web history has broadly the same objectives as hooeey. It differs from hooeey in some significant ways:

Google web history only records your web activity while you are signed in to your Google Account. hooeey works without having to worry about signing in when you launch your browser, hooeey’s already at work.

Google web history does not allow the user to access browser history off-line nor does it provide the user the ability to filter off-line what links are to be stored. Every site visited is automatically stored in Google’s server.

With hooeey, the user decides what web site links are stored and when. Google web history has no way of tagging and commenting interesting web sites. hooeey allows you to tag and comment sites as you visit them or even when you are off-line!

Google web history has no way of letting you selective share links with your friends. hooeey allows you to create or import contact lists so that you can send interesting links to anyone easily. hooeey also allows you to see a list of links that you have shared with friends, in one place.

Only hooeey provides you a way to transform boring links into a visually-rich hooeey WebTour complete with title, themes and comments that are fun to create and share.

To make it complete and to make it easy for you to stay tuned to hooeey we just started a twitter account. No worries we won’t bother you with tonnes of messages. New features and major changes will be announced here. Further we will keep you up to date on conferences and events where hooeey will be presented.

If you would like you can keep track of the frequency hooeey is mentioned in twitter messages while using the new twitter tracking feature. Here you see how it work, just send

track hooeey - When someone (anyone who updates in public) mentions “hooeey”, you’ll get it on your device in real-time.

untrack hooeey - Toggle it off with when you don’t want to receive messages about hooeey anymore.

Step-by-step hooeey gets complemented. Yesterday, we received all static pages from our supporting designer team, the Apparatus Media Lab. The team consists of Information Architects, Instructional Designers, Visual Designers, Content Designers and Delivery Managers who are a good supplement to our hooeey development team. As all of you probably know there is always a “fight” between the designer and the developer. But the output can be amazing and very structured.
The new, good looking static pages were integrated into the hooeey web-service today. Which already provide the section about hooeey, we would be able to answer frequently ask questions, the Terms of Services are fixed and the setting page is available.

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To prove that hooeey really gets a new design and usability are here two little clippings out of screen shots.

What the hell is that? We just decided to assign the term un-bookmarking to our hooeey service - it fits very well to describe one of the major hooeey feature.

In the context of hooeey it does not mean to remove a bookmark from an existing set rather than to not having the hassle, thinking and deciding if a URL is bookmark-worthy or not. Even if you not consciously and coordinated bookmark websites, the information will not get lost. hooeey offers the user the opportunity to remember and re-find websites in an efficient way. To conclude this little argument, within this context it has a positive manner in the sense that all URLs you visited during a day or two, will automatically be recorded and stored on your own hard drive.

What are the benefits of an un-bookmarking function for you as a user?

• A fortune because also peripherally noticed links are recorded & re-usable
• No waste of time while re-searching the 3W all over again, re-use of your own web browse history
• Flexibility to tag, comment, rate or delete Links while you have a free time frame
• Efficient search results since URLs get assigned additional information through tags & comments
• Privacy & control according to the off-line assigning opportunity of tags, comments and ratings

I tried to figure out, what peoples first association to the term un-bookmarking is. Therefore I posted the question to brainR - a free, community based brainstorming service. You can find their ideas here.

Here is a preview on the new design of the hooeey logo. It is totally different. The old one has a kind of a flourish character. While creating the new one we omitted the round corners. Instead we decided to go for a clear and straight design. Our intention was it to create a logo which indicates what hooeey is all about. A second issue was to make the core features more obvious and throughout the benefits for its user more transparent.

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We decided to use three tags to describe hooeeys’ main features - this is the common way nowadays within the web2.0 “bubble”.

record - your entire web browse history as you control the recording

retrieve - more relevant search results through tagging and commenting add additional information to the URL

analyze - your own search behavior see where you spend most of your time, and how long you were browsing on which day.

While surfing through the big W3 I just stumbled on an interesting web-usability research. The results were presented on the CHI 2007 conference, an event regarding Computer-Human Interaction (HCI). Every year 2000 HCI professionals, academics, and students discuss HCI and research issues and exchange knowledge regarding the topic. The focus is on how people communicate and interact with a broadly-defined range of computer systems.

The research goes along with the title “Web Page Revisitation Revisited: Implications of a Long-term Click-stream Study of Browser Usage”. It is based on an experiment within the web surfing behavior of 25 participants with diverse backgrounds was captured over a period of six month. The drawn conclusion of this research is quoted below:

“We identified opportunities for the development of new browser tools that target not the bulk of revisits, but specialize on certain user requirements for revisitation. Support for observational behavior is already given by RSS feeds, but little is known on their usability and presentation. Reutilization is partly provided by special browser extensions and appliances like ‘widgets’, yet the integration of Web services and office applications is still rarely possible.

Finally, a neglected field of research seems to be browser support for rediscovering resources that have been accessed a longer time ago. These revisits were quite rare, but often important. Neither browser history nor bookmarks seem to be reliable tools for long-term rediscovery. Instead, users re-searched and re-traced the Web for the desired information. As missing original pages often caused problems, a searchable copy of search terms, visited pages and user trails could severely enhance long-term revisitation support.”

As far as I reckoning my own surf behavior I agree to the conclusion. This insight kept me happy because this problem will be solve while using hooeey.