WebNumbr: graph any number on the web

First of all, I really like it. I think it is nice.

Some questions, then some thoughts, and some prognostications. What is the OpenID box? I don't know what to put there. I don't have an openid. Will openid be a link to the numbr? Is it my email address? I tried to click on the OI icon inside the box to get some help, but alas, I never figured out what that box is for and I'm a computer guy! (A ha, just got to firefox and it told me my email address wasn't a valid openid. hmph, did it still create? Nope, not on the first page...) Why does OpenID matter? Let me use my Email address.

Well, it's a good idea. I still like it.

When I am in Opera and I click the "Create Numbr" button, nothing happens. In IE 7, when I enter the url and click the "Pick a numbr on the Page" button, I get something about it not being displayed and then it was aborted and I see a blank nothing. On my way to firefox (see above...) Couldn't save my numbr...

What I wanted to save, was the number that appears in the link at the bottom of the first section on the cover of http://news.google.com. This number is the number of articles about the "top ranked" article at google. It would show whatever google's algorithm puts there.

But it could come from Bing or any aggregator. How popular the most popular story at Hacker News is, etc...

I tried with text too, but it said it wasn't a number. Considering the one I tried to create, it would be nice to see what that article is, though because of this particular topic, you could do a little research. For today, the top article may be obvious, but what was the world talking most about on Jan 17, 1987?

Of course the Internet wasn't around back then really, I mean, it could have been, but WebNumbr wasn't and we can't take WebNumbr back to 1987 to figure it out ... okay, we could do research today about how many newspapers in the world had a particular headline for dates past, but that would be a tremendous amount of work. It would be an undertaking so vast and incomprehensible that we just wouldn't even do it at all.

And here, you've created a piece of equipment using the power of technology, that without even thinking about it moving forward into the future is going to do that very task, with almost no human interaction -- 100% automated. A task previously thought insurmountable, on your site is being done, right now 300 times an hour or so? Could be thousands, millions, even billions really. It is able to do it with a lot of numbers, like the dow, or a stock price, or the weather on a particular day or time of day and that's very, very cool and useful for a lot of people who track things using the web.

A lot of people have to track things, so they go to the web and type them in and write them down, or enter them into a database. They don't have to do that anymore.

I can understand the technical reasons to keep it to numbers only and why the limitations are there now, but if you'll allow me to indulge in a bit of speculation about what types of things your users will request in the future, beyond what I've already mentioned, would be the ability to pick a particular number within a group of numbers. The numbr in the top articles I mentioned was actually in a span with text in it, but it accurately picked the correct number (nice work), however, what if there are multiple numbers and I want the second one, will it still work?

What about dates and times? Maybe you want to track the numbr of days since the last injury, which is a number, but what if the only number on the page would be the date of the last incident? Like the X's on one of the keep motivated articles we take in once in a while.

You also may want to alert people if the values change, I'm sure you've thought of that. Give them thresholds to fire an event or call a web page or post to a page, etc...

Those are just some ideas. Keep in touch. Remind us of you going into the future so we can monitor changes and keep track of how things are going.

Neat! I have recently been needing exactly this, as I have been obsessively checking Avatar's box office totals to see if/when it will overtake Titanic:

http://webnumbr.com/avatar-box-office-total

It might be worth checking out the Reform project: http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/toomim/toomim-reform.pdf and the Zeotrope: http://www.adobe.com/technology/pdfs/uist08zoetrope.pdf for explorations of this idea in an academic context.

edit: And, of course, CamelCamelCamel for amazon price tracking: http://camelcamelcamel.com/

Here's an, uh, example: http://webnumbr.com/tlrobinson-hacker-news-karma

(not very interesting yet but you get the idea)

I found this a little interesting. It triggered something in me that made me want to go out and find numbers! I settled with making a counter for Britney Spears popularity which does a query on Google and takes the number of hits.

It's just a dirty shame that making any kind of long-term statistics will be hard due to the screen-scraping nature of the application. Anyone's who has ever tried scraping IMDB knows what I am talking about. :)

I like it.

Just showed a blank page for the "pick a number" screen when I tried to make a number for my Stackoverflow reputation.

When trying to make one for my HN karma, it won't let me get past the next screen. Every time I click Create Numbr, it seems to do some kind of AJAX call, then highlights "Good Name!" with a red box. Over and over. A bug, I guess?

How about tracking HN stories from a custom interface. Starting with this one :)

http://webnumbr.com//points-for-hn-story-on-webnumbr

Good stuff, I like it a lot!

I'd love to see an export to CSV feature - graphs are nice, but having the actual historical numbers available would be awesome.

Heh, you guys are awesome.

Here is the number of numbrs http://webnumbr.com/webnumbrs

I can't create one, it keeps telling me: "You do not own that identity" while I certainly -do- own that OpenID and am logged in.

Funny, this was made during an internal y! hack day months ago. It's weird to see it surface now.

Neat, but the value axis in the plots should be zero based, or at least have that as an option.

Doesn't work very well when the number has thousands separated with a space.

Great, more numbers pulled out of context. Especially if you embed.

Weird I was just looking for something like this.

funny, i created this exact same thing about 4 years ago. Got it all working and then lost interest before launching it.

in "embed code for graph": 'allowTransparnecy' should be 'allowTransparency.'

What a great idea!

This is awesome.

useless data visualization, is this spam? #ITS use FLOT, it's awesome.

This is both the coolest and dumbest thing I've seen all day.