hooks in browsers?

Ray Dillinger bear at sonic.net
Tue Apr 10 12:20:31 PDT 2001



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





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