Since Third voice was found floating belly up at the top of the fishtank the other day, I've been looking at their service. I think the idea is fundamentally good; subscribers should be able to see each other's commentary on websites. That's basic speech and reputation working on the internet and a channel that's at least potentially not biased by advertising revenues. However, they had two fundamental problems; 1) As a business, the idea is fundamentally bad, because there is no viable revenue model. Clients aren't going to pay for the service, advertisisers hated their guts, and the people who put up the web sites in the first place were going to fight tooth and nail against having ordinary people express their honest opinions about their companies. 2) The central-server model is another problem, because it created a central point at which the system could be shut down. However, this looks like an excellent application for freenet or something like it. If it's distributed, peer-to-peer, and run by the clients so there's nobody they need to pay, there's also nobody to yell at and no central server to shut down. It's probably do-able to write a little application that runs on the host machine -- and when the browser loads a website, the application consults freenet asking for commentary from other clients about that website. You could do this a couple of ways; you could watch the history file for new URL's to tell you what URL has just been loaded, or the cache for HTML pages to see what HTML has just been loaded. And that could be the cue for your little application. Are there any more direct hooks into browsers? Is there any "what URL is being displayed right now" API call for example? Bear
At 12:20 PM 4/10/2001 -0700, Ray Dillinger wrote:
It's probably do-able to write a little application that runs on the host machine -- and when the browser loads a website, the application consults freenet asking for commentary from other clients about that website.
You could do this a couple of ways; you could watch the history file for new URL's to tell you what URL has just been loaded, or the cache for HTML pages to see what HTML has just been loaded. And that could be the cue for your little application.
Are there any more direct hooks into browsers? Is there any "what URL is being displayed right now" API call for example?
You might find Protozilla, at <http://protozilla.mozdev.org/>, of interest.
On 10 Apr 2001, at 12:20, Ray Dillinger wrote:
Are there any more direct hooks into browsers? Is there any "what URL is being displayed right now" API call for example?
Just took a quick glimpse at http://developer.netscape.com/docs/manuals/communicator/DDE/a btdde.htm (beware the word-wrap!) re: Netscape's DDE interface. Looks like much of what's needed is there, provided you don't mind using DDE (a bletcherous kludge at best, but at least it exists). -- Roy M. Silvernail Proprietor, scytale.com roy@scytale.com
participants (3)
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Greg Broiles
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Ray Dillinger
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Roy M. Silvernail