Great idea! I immediately thought "Why didn't I think of that!?"
With regards to the privacy concerns of Research mode, there may be a way solution. For sites like Reddit, it should be possible to build a bloom filter. Have the metafruit server actively spidering Reddit for new, popular threads and add them to a bloom filter. The plugin would download the bloom filter from the metafruit server at some regular interval. That way checking whether any particular URL has an associated conversation is just a local operation. Plus, it's faster than pinging an API, and burns less of the target API's resources.
That would also provide a way to monetize, by giving out the metafruit bloom filter to subscribers only. Or perhaps the free plugin can update its bloom filter once a day, but subscribers can update once per hour.
I might enjoy using this. But, PRIVACY! Sending back every visited URL has never been ok for any reason, first time I saw this idea shot down was in '93.
But there might be a way out:
I'd be willing to give up privacy of URL hashes. This is how I'd do it:
- you already track a set of URLs that have discussions (I assume). If not, you need to figure out how to seed these. Volunteers, APIs....
- hash these URLs on server, and use a not-too-unique hash function. You want to end up with a high collision rate, but not too high.
- now, the client can query for conversations without revealing the URL it has visited:
- ask server whether there are any conversations for a particular hash.
- if server finds any, it returns { pageUrl: '', conversationsUrls[]}
- now client can decide whether the url really matches, or it was just a random hash collision.
- I know this is not perfect. A privacy-busting determined enemy could generate hashes of large number of public sites and use statistics to infer what sites you've visited just from your hashes. But it'd be good enough for me.
Bonus money-making idea:
- offer your plugin as a paid service to different web communities. Increases their "community engagement".
I seriously contemplated starting an "annotations" startup in the 90s. Someone else did, and they folded after a few years.
This is kinda how Google's Safe Browsing[1] works, although with a few extra layers, such as (IIRC) always requesting some random hashes when confirming matches.
I read a better explanation on a mozilla mailing list once, but the key point is that it tries /really/ hard not to disclose private data.
Then there has to be a whole backend infrastructure, though. Lots more time/effort/money involved in that solution. Right now there's no recurring cost for the developer.
With regards to the privacy concerns of Research mode, there may be a way solution. For sites like Reddit, it should be possible to build a bloom filter. Have the metafruit server actively spidering Reddit for new, popular threads and add them to a bloom filter. The plugin would download the bloom filter from the metafruit server at some regular interval. That way checking whether any particular URL has an associated conversation is just a local operation. Plus, it's faster than pinging an API, and burns less of the target API's resources.
That would also provide a way to monetize, by giving out the metafruit bloom filter to subscribers only. Or perhaps the free plugin can update its bloom filter once a day, but subscribers can update once per hour.