Timelope: Make Your Browsing History Public!?!???

And here I was thinking the only business opportunity in the browsing history of consumers was in erasing your tracks! Timelope, a new social media Firefox plugin is built on the opposite idea: that people would want to share and store their browsing histories!

Huhnh?

What this is about is the idea that rather than having to choose to share the pages you visit one by one, your entire stream can be shared, and you can share your history with others that you like, respect, or find share your interests.

Here's how they describe it:

Want to store and sort your browser history (privately or publicly)? Want to follow others or have others follow you as you browse? Interested in endless links that are instantly linked together by keywords? If you said no to all of these questions, we didn't want you anyway, otherwise, sign on up and feed the Timelope. And no, Timelope may be both social and a network, but we are not a social network.

Timelope is feature rich, with the best and most glutinous features you've come to expect from web 2.0. We've got pretty colors, unnecessary AJAX requests, a bevy of poorly supported standards, and most of all we bring it all together to give you a user experience that you will not forget within 20 minutes, guaranteed. All sarcasm aside, it's fun and addictive, like cocaine but slightly less debilitating. In fact, Timelope can even bolster your productivity, maybe. Actually, no... it definitely won't help your productivity. If you care about productivity, visit our friends over at rescue time.



It's a novel concept -- one that seems like it could be very appealing to very passionate people, by which i do not necessarily mean XTUBE users.

I took about 10 minutes trying to figure out what to say next on this one. The reason is that I was trying to approach this offering in a totally rational way. If you looked at my browsing habits you'd be calling Bellevue to commit me for schizophrenia. In a given day I review hundreds of pages on at least two dozen topics, but I am not a very interesting person in real life. So why you would care to see this is out of my pay grade.

But then I started thinking a little less logically and began to see that this could be kind of fun, as well as useful in some cases. I'd equate the business value of this to that of Twitter -- which to me is more interesting than actually useful, though doubtless there are thousands of Twits who would disagree on this.

Oh, and BTW you don't have to make your entire history public, and there are some security safeguards built into it.

It's in alpha, as they clearly note on the site, so it's not all perfect yet. But it is pretty...I was going to say thought-provoking, though perhaps the right term is feeling-provoking, so you should definey check dis awt.

Fierce logo, guys! A reflecto antelope!

Thanks for reading, and don't forget to write.