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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