

Apture acquired by Google - gaborcselle
http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/10/google-buys-contextual-rich-news-browsing-startup-apture-to-beef-up-chrome/

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citricsquid
"Never heard of it" ... "Apture Highlights" ... "oh".

I hate those things, I often highlight as I scroll to keep my focus on where
I'm reading and every time I accidentally trigger these.

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jerrya
I am really saddened to read of this purchase.

Apture breaks the web in many ways. As you note it screws up and
steals/hijacks mouse behavior. It also round trips to their servers any
selection you make, making it a privacy leak. They make it hard to opt-out of
their javascript menace, and it clutters up a page.

"a browser extension" if it were solely a browser extension I wouldn't mind it
so much. The behavior that is most borrowsome is the stuff they license to
folks like the NYTimes, the Apture Hotspots.

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pasbesoin
One of the reasons I finally gave in to Adblock+ was as a convenient means of
implementing a filter against the JS that perpetrates that NYT annoyance.

My concern is as to if/when this gets rolled into core Chrome. As long as the
functionality is loading over the wire, I'll remain hopeful that I can block
it and that sites will remain usable in that state. If it's an extention or
plug in that I can disable, I can live with that as well, I guess. If it's
baked in... Well, I guess it won't be baked into Firefox et al.

I don't mind useful, opt-in lookup features. For example, the Babelfish
Firefox extension that does select and click translation. But such features
continue to be killed off. I suspect initiatives like this purchase are
instead intended more to "game" me into further staying/interacting with
"blessed" sites and their subsidiary or partner content.

It's their content, I guess. But I'll probably "opt out".

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jaequery
Congrats to the Apture team. But to be honest, I never found sites having
Apture useful. It kind of distracted me in many ways.

I hate anything that puts underlines / icons into the texts I'm reading. Not
to mention, it is borderline spamvertisement and even virus-like.

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Aloisius
I have very different reactions to talent, product, user and technology
acquisitions.

I wish someone would track which kind of acquisition is made and let me track
it by acquiring company. From my limited vantage point, Google seems to make
mostly talent acquisitions and that generally makes me sad.

Anyone know which this was?

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TruffleLabs
Apture helped enhance web sites with supporting media functionality. For
smaller sites that did not have time or talent to get widgets and such
installed, Apture offered a simple way to do media feature upgrades with a
very small investment of time. I will miss those features.

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yarone
How interesting. I worked on something very similar back in 2005 (but never
launched): RocketMenu

[http://www.yarone.com/2011/02/rocketmenu-unobtrusive-
search-...](http://www.yarone.com/2011/02/rocketmenu-unobtrusive-search-
and.html)

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mr_contractor
What's a typical acquisition compensation package for a non-founding engineer
being acquired by Facebook, Google, eBay,etc? Anyone know?

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barredo
They removed Apture from the Chrome Store just now

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pook1e
I have never heard of Apture up until now, but I love the idea. Congrats to
both Tristan and Can, keep up the great work.

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pablasso
I love contextual search on tablets, and really hate it on the browser.

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kennywinker
Google takes one step closer to becoming skynet and GLaDOS.

Apture Science, we do what we can because we must.

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dizidoro
Larry Johnson and Cave Brin

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nchuhoai
Love it. Can't wait to see how they will incooperate it into Chrome

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dizidoro
Someone else also read APERTURE?

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bascule
Google acquired Aperture Science?!?!

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sliverstorm
I'm guessing they wanted to, but this was the closest they could get

