We also made some changes to the hooeey toolbar (V 2.5)
We have made some changes which should help users get better visibility of their browsing.
4. All links are private by default and they can be shared with friends. The option to share with the public, as well as the public area for shared links, is now discontinued
5. A self-serve account deletion facility is now available in the “Settings” for users to delete their hooeey account if they wish to leave
Here is a link to a panel discussion where Josh Kopelman discusses the growing interest in the implicit web. In its simplest terms, implicit web refers to meaning that can be deduced by looking at patterns in a unified data agglomeration. It reminds one of how astronomers locate the position of a black hole (which of course, cannot be seen!) by observing the pattern and behaviour of planetary and celestial bodies in the vicinity of that black hole. So will this trend usher in primacy of heuristics over algorithms and methods?
As hooeey is playing a part in helping users gather their browsing information which will be a crucial component of the implicit web, we eagerly await growing awareness of this trend.
More from Josh’s own posting.
The who’s-who and the who’s-to-be of the web were all to be found at the Web 2.0 Expo that concluded a couple of weeks ago at San Francisco. The Expo brought together entrepreneurs, technologists, VCs and companies and this was reflected in the topics covered by various tracks and keynote addresses.
The various presentations can be found here. While a whole host of luminaries addressed the gathering, none was more entertaining than ‘Fake Steve Jobs’ aka Dan Lyons. See his keynote address here.
We are reproducing a snippet from an interview done by the Guardian with Amir Nathoo, CEO of WebMynd, a start-up in the web browser history space (which we mentioned in an earlier posting). On competition, Amir Nathoo, has this to say:
“Del.icio.us has a large social element but there are very few visual cues. Delicious is established in the bookmarking business but they are operating on a tired platform that has not evolved. Zotero is geared to the academic community for research purposes and Hooey, despite its poor interface, has much of the functionality we are looking to build into WebMynd - specifically sharing, sorting, and analytics. (emphasis ours)
“Furl is excessively labour intensive, and takes users away from their natural browsing flow. They do save images of pages like we do but data entry is very tedious.
“There’s also Iterasi, which allows dynamic pages to be saved and “notarised” which is similar to the way we save pages. They do not save every page by default, and there are pop ups and manual data entry. The company has not yet launched a public version but have a demo video on their site.”
From the look of things, hooeey has set the benchmark in the browser history application space.
Over the weekend, hooeey has been fortunate to receive positive coverage from reputed newspapers.
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.”
Bookmarking
blinklist del.icio.us stumbleupon
Highlighters
clipmarks diigo firenoodle i-Lighter
Visual
(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.
The year is coming to a close and we at hooeey have had a tremendous year. hooeey has been quietly making an impact. Various well-known and well-respected blogs have covered hooeey and as a result we have initial users from 80+ countries! The number of browser history links stored by users has jumped by a factor of 3 in just two months of going live. The coming year looks promising thanks to all the hooeey users. Thank you all and you have a great year ahead.
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.
