
hystry: Give me your browser history, and I will give you an inbox for the web - akkartik
http://hystry.com
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akkartik
My goal has been to focus on two use cases:

1\. When I return to a popular story on reddit/slashdot/digg I would like to
see highlighted the comments that were posted since I last visited it. (digg
is only in theory; does it ever get interesting comments?)

2\. When I post a comment on a blog it usually has very little traffic. I
never bother returning to see if someone responded to my comment, and would
like to be reminded of it only when that happens.

[update]

All comments most appreciated. I will be only online one hour everyday for the
next few days(I wrote this while on vacation travellling in india), so expect
responses in 24-36 hours. Thanks.

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staunch
Give you my browser history, and I've lost my privacy and security.

This is interesting, but unless you keep my history private I would never use
this. It is possible for Firefox extensions to store data locally, so maybe
you could.

~~~
akkartik
This is a FAQ. <http://hystry.com/faq.html>

Firefox extensions are restricted to javascript. Consider an extension that is
about comparable in terms of computing resources: searching in scrapbook
(<http://amb.vis.ne.jp/mozilla/scrapbook> ). On any reasonable set of pages
saved, searching is dog slow. hystry's workflow - saving the state of every
page you visit, and then performing diffs when you ask for them - is equally
non-trivial. Also, scrapbook gradually makes firefox unresponsive as we keep
adding pages to it. I have scrapbook setup to save every page I read, and need
to save elsewhere the gigabyte of data it generates every month. This kind of
computation and storage is what the website is for.

hystry.com is pretty slow as well so far, but at least it doesn't keep popping
up a dialog asking if you should let the javascript thread continue. And it
will become faster over time.

~~~
staunch
For me the FAQ's answer is unsatisfactory. The claim that "The information
cannot be connected with you" is a misleading falsehood. You can and so could
any bad guy that has penetrated your system.

No one who cares cares about their security or privacy could use your
application in its current form. Thankfully there's lots of people who don't,
so you should be fine. Good luck.

~~~
akkartik
Thanks. If you have any suggestions on how to make it work locally I'd be
interested to hear them.

Moving from a desktop to a web service will always involve some loss of
privacy. The trend seems to be to deemphasize privacy.

~~~
ralph
A proxy server running on the user's machine? It gets to see everywhere the
user goes. A Javascript or plugin can communicate with the proxy for better
browser integration.

~~~
akkartik
Hmm, I'll think about this one. Proxies are so far complex to install, perhaps
this can be streamlined.

I end up backing up an ever-growing scrapbook archive out of my PC every
month. Perhaps most people don't care about backups. With hard disk capacities
growing as they are, 100MB/month compressed may be a reasonable rate of disk
usage.

~~~
staunch
Perhaps you could only track specific sites? My digg/reddit/slashdot/blog
traffic is already quite public, so thats the kind of stuff I wouldn't worry
about. I'm not totally sure if that kind of approach would limit you too much.
I'm thinking something like the way ad blocking software has large lists of ad
servers, etc.

~~~
akkartik
Yeah, the FAQ answer sort of hinted at this: "You will soon be able to control
in the firefox extension what pages we are aware of."

<http://hystry.com/faq.html>

I visualize it as allowing either a whitelist of sites to send out or a
blacklist of sites to avoid sending out. I'll bump this idea up my todo list.

------
jey
Hystry is not something I'd use, but the demo impressed me. It seems to work
simply and as advertised with no hassle and no frills. It does miss some
changes though, e.g. on reddit a bunch of parent comments were listed as
having been modified but the child comments were not.

This seems like it would be better implemented entirely client-side. That way
the privacy concerns automatically disappear, it'll be more responsive, and
your server won't have to expend a lot of bandwidth/CPU/disk to fetch, create
and store all the diffs.

~~~
akkartik
Ah, so you've tried it!

The html diff was harder than I expected (it has to handle comment
permutations, for example) so I'm not surprised it has bugs. Can you point me
to a specific URL, ideally one of the hystry.com/diff/ URLs? Much appreciated.

