I created a bookmarking service you can love.
historio.us
historio.us
My suggestion is that you start looking into ways to group and organize people's bookmarks automatically. You could start with some simple things, but I'm very curious to see how more advanced methods would work out.
My biggest feature request: let me import my google bookmarks quickly and easily.
You can import your Google bookmarks easily by uploading your bookmarks.html from Google directly on our "historify site" page. However, this is currently disabled for performance reasons, but we will soon (i.e. in the next few days) re-enable it for the users' convenience. Please follow our Twitter feed to be informed on the status of this, and thank you again for your preference!
Also, there is a Chrome extension available and we will be writing more as time progresses (sadly there are more important issues to address).
Thank you very much!
Although instead if emphasizing text search, which I didn't find that useful in the beta testing, we focues on combinations of tags, dates, domains, including terms like "today" and "month", but there is still full page text search, which can be used in combination with those other search terms.
Maybe its too complicated for most, but I find it useful and use it many, many times a day.
The different in response could easily be the marketing? Cool idea either way - both of them.
For example, if I install the Chrome extension, and then visit my banking site, are you indexing my bank statements?
Do you only index pages we click Historify on? The answer to that question ought to be in the privacy policy. You're asking us to install an extension and give you access to EVERYTHING we do in the browser, but not explicitly stating the limits on it.
That said, if you're indexing EVERYTHING I browse to, I think this is actually a really killer app. An app with some insane privacy challenges, but a killer one nonetheless. If you're only indexing the stuff I bookmark, that's pretty cool, and a good step forward, but less exciting to me.
We're sorry to be less exciting, but we do indeed only index the historified sites, otherwise the noise would be too much for historious to be of any usefulness. Luckily the cost of bookmarking a page is really low (just one click), so you can do it as often as you like!
The extension is open source, you can download and run it yourself if you don't trust the packaged one:
http://bitbucket.org/Stavros/historious.crx
Thanks!
The indexing happened on the server, and the extension only sent URLs, not params or cookies. So pages needing login wouldn't be compromised.
You could have an extension that indexes everything the user goes to. The trick would be making it usable; I almost never use the "history" in my browser, because it tends to never find what I'm looking for. But if you try and solve it in a centralized way, you could do several interesting things:
* Make searches across all the sites you visited work better, maybe by creating better indexes of the content.
* Make the search work according to sites you visited the most (e.g. I'd prefer the search to find comments on HN before other things, then articles linked to from HN, etc.).
Such a service might be pretty useful: browser history that doesn't suck, and is persistent and accessible online. Anyone want to build it?
FYI: History in Safari rocks. Just open the history view and you have fast searching (including in page text - just checked) that shows all the resulting pages in a coverflow view.
Still, something computer and browser independent might make for an interesting application.
The code is all C#/MSSQL/JavaScript/XUL. If anyone's still interested gmail me at my username, and sorry for the off-topic posts!
The drawback: it saves your history to local disk, and the search can get arbitrarily slow over time. I archive my history every fortnight. For older history I use grep.
It isn't something for normals, but I basically have every page I've ever browsed to since Aug '06.
Google chrome has full text search over your history. And yes, I love it.
- Import from delicious, to help get people started.
- An option to automatically add the tags from delicious as part of the text that you search, because many websites do not contain sufficient text to be findable without tags (ex: youtube videos with bad titles, direct links to images/other non-html content, etc)
- There is currently a feature to import from delicious (go to "historify site"), but it has been temporarily disabled while we make our crawler multithreaded, because the unexpected popularity and people trying to import thousands of links at once made indexing very slow for everyone. It should be up again in the next few days.
- That is a very good idea! I'm not sure if the delicious dump file has them, but it should, I'll add it to our bug tracker, thanks!
The auto tweet option is cool, but what about a "post to FaceBook" option. Might help you adopt a few more people.
URL shortening service might also be something to look at- historio.us/linkid. You will have to switch some stuff up, like the key- historio.us/user/key_value.
Allow me to also change my email, not just password. Might even think about using OpenID in as well.
Look into a real FireFox addon- Reddit's Socialite would be a good place to start. You can also make a tiny addon to include search in Firefox[2].
Examples in the api documentation would be nice. I keep getting a "3" response when I request a key.
Found the answer to most of these in the FAQ, but I would still like to do it all with the UI[1]- who reads FAQs?
I'm free this summer if you need some help. All I ask for is a recommendation when all is said and done, or not if you are not pleased.
[1] http://historio.us/help/faq/
[2] https://developer.mozilla.org/en/creating_opensearch_plugins...
1) You can't see your bookmark, that's the point. You don't have to see them unless you're looking for them! However, we realise people might need to see the entire list, so you can search for * or "http" to get a list of your bookmarks. The * search is a bit broken right now, but we are working to fix it.
2) Facebook posting is also planned!
3) Thanks for that idea, I will add it to our tracker!
4) That is also a good idea, we will have to resend you a validation email but that's fine. OpenID would also be great, we want to support it very very much and will do after the high-priority items are sorted.
5) A Firefox extension is planned, but is lower priority right now. Any volunteers who wanted to write an open source extension would be welcome!
6) You are probably getting a 3 because you are forgetting the "agent" parameter, if everything else is correct. We do need example, though, thanks!
7) Who wants to clutter the UI? :P
We'd love some help, and would be glad to recommend you! Please contact me at stavros at historious if you'd like. Also, thank you for the Mozilla link, I wasn't aware of that and it is very useful.
Please add a 'Browse' button
> We will also never share the content of your historified pages with anyone, although we might use the URLs of pages to compile anonymized lists of popular or new links. We will, however, never share any information about which pages you, personally, have historified.
I think that might be a mistake. You'll lose the ability to get people in for social networking/SEO reasons, and nobody trusts a service like this to stay private any more anyways. At first I thought, "Well, that's more useful because it's private" - and then I thought, "Who am I kidding? They'll just make it public anyways if they get big."
You might consider setting the default to public, maybe with an option for private.
To address your points, there are no plans for your bookmarks to be public, or have an option to show a page with them, either. The nature of the site doesn't lend itself to public bookmarks at all, as there is no list of bookmarks to publicise in the first place. To make it public we would have to add a search box for people to search in your bookmarks, which may or may not be useful...
I see what you mean about it, and I agree, but many people have said "I will never use this if I can't have privacy", so we listened to them. It might, however, be a typical case of the users not knowing what they want, because nobody seems to mind facebook...
Question: Are you building a fun tool for the good of humanity, or do you plan to make money at some point? From everything that I've seen, making a way to publicise a list of bookmarks could help you if you're going the latter route.
> It might, however, be a typical case of the users not knowing what they want, because nobody seems to mind facebook...
Yes, my first thought was, "I'd only use this if it's private" - my second thought was, "Wait, actually, I'd use it either way, pretty similarly, and there'd be additional value if it's public." I might see what people choose instead of what people say. People talk a lot and then do different things. Just something to think about, and congrats on launching a pretty cool service.
Currently, a way of sharing that I, personally, have found works pretty well is to enable AutoTweet, which tweets your historified links with a tag. Then you can search for #historified and you see links people all over the world have historified. That is just an aside, however, and we will absolutely look into link sharing.
We don't want to use your links for nefarious purposes or to divulge anything embarrassing, but having a more lax policy that enables sharing is something we do want.
Thank you again for your feedback, it is sincerely appreciated.
I wonder if you asked them if they wanted to be able to share with others?
One last thing.
You won't get anything out of asking users.
What you will get something out of is asking customers.
I've been using Diigo for 8 months now and it's just great (I have used some other services like delicious previously, but they really can't compare to Diigo which just offers a lot more functionality).
2) That whole search for '' thing is pretty lame.. put a link to see 'all'
3) Good on you to make a chrome plugin, but I find it unintuitive. Clicking on it to bookmark, great, but how do I get to your domain which I always mistype? I think I'd rather have a very simple menu pop up (big icons?) when I click the plugin, one with '+' one with a magnifying glass for search. Something like that. The two most common things I'm going to use this for is adding and searching, you only make one of those easy with the extension.
Hope you can figure out the scaling issues, bummer to have it melt when you get press.
1) Yes, the indexer has been lagging a bit behing :/ The search engine is just so slow, we'll replace it right away.
2) I guess a simple link wouldn't hurt, we'll look into placing it on the page.
3) That is true, we can have the extension automatically add historious as a search provider when you install it, which would solve both problems.
Thanks again!
i don't bookmark sites because i don't realize i'll find them valuable till after i've left.
I really dislike the top image you have ("in three easy steps") because i sat looking at it wondering if it were an image or a video or a heading, can you make it more obvious it's a slideshow?
after signing up: ew email confirmation. also seems like i accidentally signed up twice.
i installed your extension, but have no idea what it does :) also, what does "historify site" mean?
if i could summize my feedback in a line it'd be: looks neat, but tell me (the user) what the bet is i'm taking in using your service. clearly.
The image we do need to change, as it blends in too much. The email confirmation is just for resetting your password, we don't use it for much else right now... The extension just bookmarks sites when you click it.
Thanks, we will change the front page to reflect all this!
I've used delicious, ever since it was a perl script running on a single server by Joshua. Days went by, delicious went through it revolution/evolution cycles and stationed where it is right now. However, as a facebook and twitter user, I want to have all my links and re-tweets save automatically in my bookmark service. That is, If I tweet about a fascinating page, I'd like to able to easily retrieve it 6 months later.
that is to say, auto-tweet is nice feature but I am looking for the vice versa (twitter, facebook, buzz, wherever I go and save/mark links).
Wish you good luck with your new service.
I "historified" this site - HN. Then searched for it in terms of "Hacker News" and got
No documents matched your search.
To add more documents to your history, just install the historio.us bookmarklet!
http://historio.us/search/?q=hacker+news&search=Searchhttp://blog.historio.us/performance-problems-and-lessons-in-...
First, it didn't work for me.. I bookmark hacker news with the chrome extension and I still see the wheel turning.. and even if I search for all site I bookmarked, I don't see hacker news.
Second, is it really necessary to create an account and check with email, etc. maybe histio.us/d0m could create automatically an account where I can search and put a password if I want it secure.
Third, it could be useful if we can search with the chrome extension, instead of only being able to add bookmark.
Fourth, pretty cool and keep it up :)
Did you thought of a way to make money with that?
I'd like this too!
The Chrome extension has some problems, sadly, but we can't reproduce the issue and they are not consistent at all (e.g. some users found that reinstalling the extension makes them go away). We have no idea why it's behaving that way, sadly :(
Email confirmation not really that necessary, and I agree that it's an unnecessary burden. We will look into removing the email verification (but an account is necessary as you need to be assigned an API key)...
We're adding historious as a search provider in the extension now!
We believe that we should make a fun product first and monetize it later (it's the wrong way around, I know, but we like it)!
1. In my Historious settings, add my Delicious feed URL
2. Find a cool link and add it via the Delicious bookmarklet
3. Historious polls the feed, picks up the new link, and grabs the page
Now I have the best of both worlds:
1. If I want to see a list of my URLs, I can browse them via Delicious.
2. If I want to search the saved page data, I can do so via Historious.
As an alternative you can put the Delicious bookmarklet code and the Historio.us bookmarklet code together in one giant bookmarklet to post to both at once. It's not very elegant, but it works.
So you got that covered, and I will use it.
However, I just signed up and imported all my delicious bookmarks and did a search for a tag and the results were not so impressive. Only 5 with historious and 17 on delicious. Hopefully this will get better.
Looking forward to using your service. Good job!
[NOTE: I just noticed there is an actual bookmark as I suggested below. OK.]
I ended up editing the breaks out of the text to get the bookmark to work.
You should probably bury the bookmarklet text in a link, and have the user drag that to the bookmarks bar.
Also, you are not sniffing Safari 4 correctly. I get a message that it is an unrecognized browser!
I would be careful about this. Sniffing browsers isn't always a good idea. Instead, let users drag their own bookmarklet- that correspond with their browser type- to the toolbar. Or keep sniffing and if you do receive an "unrecognized browser" response fall back to a page of that type.
I don't have time right to work out why it's not working, so hopefully I'll get to try out your service a bit later.
Good luck!
You found a great article yesterday - now you can't find it!
Thanks again!
Three suggestions:
1. Add a snippet with the search terms highlighted
2. Show the date bookmarked in the result list and (if possible) the date of the last update.
3. Document the query language for extended queries
Two questions:
1. Do you reindex bookmarks after some time?
2. What indexing engine and platform do you use? (lucene/java?)
One remark:
1. The Chrome extension is unable to bookmark sometimes. The bookmarklet is working great.
1) That is planned and will be added soon, it is a very good idea.
2) I have no idea why we don't do this already, we'll add it straight away!
3) We will, but right now we will be changing backends, so we will document the new one (probably Sphinx with EXTENDED2).
We don't reindex documents, as they are cached and never change (when you bookmark something, the bookmarklet sends the source to the server, which is how we can bypass registrations and paywalls). Plus, you need the document to be as you remember it.
We currently use Whoosh with Python, but it turns out to be excruciatingly slow. We will change to either Sphinx or Solr.
We don't know why the extension does that :( We can't reproduce it on any of our computers, but many users seem to have the problem :/
Check it out here: http://imi-imi.appspot.com/
* Add a private and public option for bookmarks. Then offer two bookmarklets one for private links, the other for public ones.
* Accept both username and email address when logging in. Otherwise 1Password users will not be able to login automatically.
The point of the site is to not have lists of bookmarks, though, so you can add many many sites and then find them easily. I find that, if I have a list, I tend to either try and keep it tidy or, if I don't, I just get frustrated and never look at it. We wanted historious to never show you the extent of your bookmarks, and to just give you the info you want transparently. That's why the notion of "public bookmarks" is hard to apply here...
* Convince me that this will remain private, forever.
* Assure me that this will remain in business. You can do this in two ways: 1) Charge me $10 a year. 2) Provide an export function from the get go.
One suggestion: Your use case is well defined. Don't get thrown off by people in here suggesting millions of features.
I save the 1.5mb page to my dropbox every once in a while and I'm good to go.
Of course I'm probably not your target audience.
Thanks for your feedback!
EDIT: Sorry, I didn't answer your first question: We use a Linode in Georgia, so if you're near there it should be pretty fast (their servers are quite fast too).
Is there a search help page showing advanced search criteria?
Edit: This does look cool, though.
Suggestions: 1) Chrome extension: keybinding to add current page. 2) Search results: time options. - filtering, eg last 24h/last month - sorting, results with time headlines and good spacing for quicker overview (looking for some news article read last week)