

Ask YC:  Beyond Twitter:  Why not broadcast your web surfing live but only for shared links/domains? - amichail

The idea is to that you would specify a list of URLs and/or domains that are shared and any time you browse a shared web page, your friends would see it.<p>By broadcast, I mean just show the URLs and possibly also their titles (without URL get parameters), not the actual screen contents.<p>Of course, people might use this data in some unexpected ways. For example, they might use your web surfing habits as a way to estimate your IQ.
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kyro
So a more watered down and limited friendfeed?

I don't use friendfeed all that much now, so your proposal isn't that
appealing to me.

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amichail
The idea applies to any site -- not just social ones. So it's not a subset of
friendfeed. For example, you might want to broadcast your browsing of cnn.com.

One might even approve all urls to be broadcast live for a given domain. For
example, this would allow you to see what your friend is reading on reddit in
real-time. But of course, you probably don't want to activate this feature for
your banking site, stock trading site, etc.

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kyro
I get the gist of your idea, from your other comments, now.

People surf the internet at an incredibly rapid and random rate. It'd be more
than annoying to see link after link posted by the millisecond. I'd also bet
that most of the time, sites where your friends contribute are sites that will
probably appeal the most to you and have some sort of value. Even if you limit
to specific sites, sure that's narrowing it down, but you're narrowing it down
from millions of sites to hundreds, which is still pretty inconvenient for me
to follow, considering I am an extremely extremely popular person and have an
innumerable amount of friends. You get the point.

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amichail
You could rank URLs higher that have been browsed by more of your friends in
the last 30 minutes, etc.

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kyro
That doesn't necessarily mean that those links are of more value. Say I got
rickrolled, and my friend sees that in my history, and clicks through only to
be rickrolled, and so forth. Next thing you know, I've ultimately rickrolled
my entire social circle (I'd love that). Replace rickroll with porn and you
get a worse (or better) situation. Trust in your links will wane.

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amichail
Your friends would learn to avoid certain URLs after a while. Also, the title
of the web page should probably be displayed along with the URL.

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amichail
Also, you could make it so that a URL is ranked higher if more time was spent
checking it out.

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thorax
Reminds me somewhat of <http://me.dium.com/>

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rms
WebMynd has close to this functionality.

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amichail
Really? How so?

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rms
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=167657>

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amichail
Making it real-time and friend-based would make this potentially compelling,
especially if you use the ranking heuristics mentioned elsewhere in this
discussion.

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bigbang
this is done in friendfeed

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amichail
I think you misunderstood my proposal.

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superchink
You might want to help explain the differences between your proposal and
friendfeed, so he can better understand.

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amichail
This isn't about tracking contributions to social sites.

It's about showing people what web page you are currently looking at, even if
you are not contributing any content.

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superchink
I see what you're saying. My initial thoughts are that there would be serious
quality control issues. For example, I know that 90% of the content I look at
on a daily basis is of little interest to someone else, and probably a sizable
percentage of that is not even really relevant for me.

How would the content be filtered, if at all?

I'm not knocking your idea; I'm just trying to imagine the value of such a
tool.

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amichail
You would specify which domains/URLs you would like to broadcast. So if
something is obviously of little interest to others, you might want to keep it
private.

Also, as mentioned elsewhere, you could make it so that a URL would rank
higher if more of your friends looked at it in the last 30 minutes, etc.

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aswanson
Why don't you just put it out there and see if people like it?

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amichail
Well, for a start, it's not easy for me to build since I have no idea how to
build browser plugins...

There's also a privacy issue. Maybe people would not trust my implementation
really does what I claim it does.

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aswanson
Just do it. What happened to the LCD numbrosia you were going to do? I was
thinking about that; pretty good idea. You wouldn't even need lcd's just an
array of digital bar displays.

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amichail
That touch screen puzzle device was just an idea I had. It wasn't something I
had the expertise to build.

In any case, I later found out that it has already been done:

[http://gizmodo.com/338502/magic-cube-heralds-the-future-
of-g...](http://gizmodo.com/338502/magic-cube-heralds-the-future-of-gaming-
and-human-interfaces)

~~~
aswanson
I don't see numbrosia on those things! You can still do it. Every idea is
already implemented in some form or another anyway. Team up with a hardware
EE, a good undergrad could do it. You have the code already. Start her up.

