A new YCombinator startup called WebMynd launched today. It’s a Firefox add-on that records every website you visit and saves a virtual copy on your hard drive.
The service doesn’t save just an image of the page or the URL, but the full text site. That means you can also search those virtual pages later when you are looking for something.
Users can turn off recording at any time, and can delete saved pages that they don’t want to have around for any reason. To see saved pages, you click on an icon at the top of the browser and the local saved copies pop up, along with a search bar.
The idea is that, like Gmail, good search means you don’t have to spend a lot of time bookmarking and tagging websites to find them later. WebMynd records everything in the background, and a quick search will locate the page.
One thing I’d love to see added is a text box somewhere on the browser where you can type in tags to describe any page you are on, and to have that data saved along with the virtual page. The result could make searching easier down the road.
The basic add-on is free and keeps pages for a week. Users pay $10 for six months of history or $20 for a full year. After testing this I can tell it’s a service I’ll continue to use to quickly find sites I visited. Simple service, basic business model, and useful. Classic YCombinator stuff.
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What about (Kerry) Beagle? It does just that and more. And it’s free.
How are they going to monetize this?
they going well , you can get more feedback from the following address.
http://cyberdesignz.com/
Luke - the key here is absolute ease of installation and use.
WSV - dude, read the last paragraph.
It reminds me of Looksmart’s FURL (http://www.furl.net/).
(And this startup seems to be experiencing Techcrunch effect.
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oh yeah…furl. except it didn’t automatically record, did it?
I profiled Furl on June 19, 2005, eight days after starting techcrunch.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2005/06/19/profile-furl/
Did you notice any slow down, Mike? I could imagine an automated site-saving service would only cause FF to hog more resources. Isn’t that why browsers already have a limit to their history logs?
Performance questions aside, is there much utility in offering the ability to back track through your own browsing history from 6 - 12 months ago? If I want to go back to a site, I know where I usually start, and it begins with a G (and it also involves a quick search to locate the page). I use my Google search box more than the bloomin’ URL bar…
no slow down for me.
I prefer the Furl approach, more to the point the “quick furl” button where one simply punches a button for things they want to remember.
I really don’t want some system wasting disk space by recording EVERY page I visit, as I read too much junk online as it is.
Plus Furl works in Safari.
This sounds like a bug, not a feature. It would be one thing if it saved at a remote location, utilizing something like EC2, but on my hard drive? Even as a text file, I’d be willing to bet within three months it would kill my laptop hard drive. Any given day, I have upwards of 60-some-odd tabs open in my Firefox window alone, and I clear it down to five by day’s end. And probably 75% of those sites would NEVER need to be seen again.
I thought we were supposed to be moving AWAY from these huge information dumps and into apps that helped us parse relevance? The thought of having to clean these files out as well as my regular file cleaning, cookie removal, and email dig-outs gives me the willies.
Could i just not create a firefox searchbox that searches my cache and get the same thing?
Maybe Im missing the difference between creating a Firefox search box (with logo) to search cache and this?
Difference here is that it is not saving it in cache and saving your pages on their server like Foxmarks?
Could this be web 3.0?
http://groups.google.com/group.....ring-sites
“Classic YCombinator stuff.”
If this saves the pages to my own HD and not to the web, then why do I have to pay them more to be allowed to store a greater amount of history? It’s not their storage that’s being used, it’s mine.
Someone will make a free version of this. I’m not sure why they think it’s a viable business to pay for what you already have.
it seems to be a good idea
the question, how long will this program keep the log (if the older visits disappear after a while)
after a while the search will take very long
OR
I could just let the Google browser sync record all my history.
Then I could proceed to use an extension like Stealther when I dont want to have pages saved in my history, that way they are never deleted.
I dont know, this just seems like a fancy history feature, which I have always felt was kinda useless.
Of course, I bookmark everything, and everything has a folder. I tend to have between 200-500 bookmarks, depending on how recent I have reinstalled Windows and not backed them all up.
Now that I use Browser Sync, that hasnt really been a problem.
Failure!
Charging for bookmarking my stuff?
It is like Google charging for every search.
Preposterous!
I think it’s a great idea.
Saving your web surfing on your own hard drive is a good move from a privacy standpoint. If you think your hard disk is going to blow from this than you live in 1995. 15 lines of text takes about 1Kb of disk space. So if you browsed 60 URLs a day for 10 years you would end up with a whopping 15MB file!
Exactly this is built into Opera, from 9.5 Beta, for free …
Thanks for all the interest. We just wanted to clear up some of the questions people have raised
1. Copies of pages are kept on your hard drive so that in future versions you will be able to view your collections offline. For those concerned about storage we plan to offer archiving options so that you can decide how much storage or for how long things get saved on your HD.
2. WebMynd is different than using a search of your browser cache because it is visual and takes advantage of the brains ability to quickly recognize previously viewed graphics.
http://www.google.com/search?q.....+search%22
I would ban their Bot from spidering my site - I dont want the entire content copied.
If this proves to be at all useful someone will just write a Firefox plug in that does it for free.
Questions of disk space and whether you’d want to remember *everything* aside, the service is useless beyond one year’s use. The point of bookmarking is permanence. I can count on my del.icio.us bookmarks being around forever (at the bear minimum the copy in my Firefox extension will persist if the service ever goes away). This is bookmarking with Alzheimer’s — a true step backwards.
@16. i agree
who’d pay for a premium bookmarking service?
we all like bookmarks, but c’mon…
The key to this product is that it is a simple install and “just works.” I really like the visual history scrolling, it kinda feels Apple-ish. I can see alot of people using this.
Congrats to the WebMynd guys. Very cool stuff (and they’ve got a lot more on the horizon).
I LIKE THE CONCEPT.
agree with others. I will sure use it if it is free. but not for now… but the concept is really cool. I guess any other company who clone this and offer it for free would win.
uninstalled: went into an endless “cannot get content in frame” loop when checking my yahoo mail (i know, i know, switch to gmail…)
Chargie no likee. It’s kinda nifty though. I just Furl’d it. lulz.
btw WebMynd needs to work on their Google rank!
What happens when I go to work? My bookmarks stay at home? Bad, no?
Congrats to the WebMynd team! Great product. Looking forward to seeing what features you add next.
Seems like a good idea, but will the pages stored will be of little value to most. You see - most information online is temporal in nature. Using this tool makes it too easy to save infomation. Saving should be difficult - that way you are forced to make a judgement about it’s future value.
Most will end up with a harddrive of junk.
Sort of like controlc.com - One of the main programmers of invision power board coded it.. Brandon Farber I think. Anyways you can sign up with the code ” beta4040 “
I could see two nice uses for this:
- if I were bad at bookmarking, and I wanted to find “that one site about the linux cron options I remember seeing a few weeks ago”
- if I were good at bookmarking, but I wanted to find something not based on the page title, or my brief notes, but on the page content itself.
Granted, I could see someone making a free version. Or perhaps a service that hooks into your del.icio.us bookmarks & allows a full-text search of all the referenced urls.
Ben:
Simpy allows full-text search in bookmarks
Caprese:
They are charging for the good service that they are offering you. Like TiVo itself, they are charging you for the service they offer.
I rather pay for a good service than flashing me plenty of advertisements. Lets just wait and see, the service is still developing and it still need to have a lot of improvements.
I like to see some social aspect so it can go viral, like social tag searching. No username required, so as to not invade the privacy of another person’s activities.
What about using multiple computers, cellphone browsing?
Is there any way to sync atleast 3 devices ? Yeah for that you need server sync and nobody wants their browser history online.
Spotlight in Leopard indexes the text of every site you visit and is searchable. However, on finding a result it simply gives you the URL for matches to a query. So you can’t read the stuff offline.
Nice feature - the latest Opera Browser beta basically does the same thing out of the box (and free of course):
It creates a full-text index of all words on all pages you ever visit.
So, in addition to what WebMynd does, you have that full-text index for split-second searches available!
Way to go, Opera!
Mike - something that you have failed to mention in relation to this service are the copyright implications of storing full websites on your hard-drive? Whats more, they are charing you to do it! You would have to have a serious “legal review” of this site for storing full websites - everything stored - and charging you for it.
Not sure I would be all that happy with a service that downloads a fullsite to a hard-drive, quickly, easily which can then be parsed via desktop programs and reuploaded to other sites?
My 2 cents…..
Despite all the hoopla created by TC on new SB tools, I continue to love Furl. I’ll be the first to admit that it hasn’t added a whole lot of bells and whistles lately, but it’s still the best on the market. I’m not so sure I want a) automatic saves and b) to pay for a bookmarking tool. I saw that Looksmart recently sold findarticles.com to CNET. Be interesting to see if they’ll offload Furl too.
I guess Google Desktop lets you search through your web history as well.
#41
Shouldn’t be a problem. “Fair use”.
This isn’t a service, it’s hobbled software that you have to keep paying for in perpetuity. It will soon be overshadowed by a free, open-source version or built right into the next version of FireFox. Or built into the next version of the google toolbar to be used in conjunction with google desktop (for free!)
The way this thing should work to have any value is to have WebMynd hit the same URLs as you do and keep a copy of the content on their servers. That’s a service. Google would be ideally placed to offer this with little effort.
I don’t know about this. I also have a lot of tabs open daily and jump around a lot. Much of what I visit, I have no real interest in going back to it in the future. If I do find something I like, I put the link in my bookmarks and use X1 to find it. If I want to save an actual page, I use the FF Scrapbook plug-in.
Oh please!
This was done in the ’90s! It’ll make as much money now as it did then. Was anyone at YCombinator even around in the 90s?
Hmmm… what’s the expression about history? Something along the lines of, those who are doomed to repeat it.
THIS IS BULLSHIT CRAP… “THATs ALL!!
Damn it . . . Michael A, why are you such an arrogant SOB? Can’t people just leave comments without your condescending follow-up remarks? Keep your day job creating great blog posts, and leave the commentary to masses.
simple site, simple service, simple business model, simple to implement
so a free version for unlimited history will show up soon and then the simple business model goes poof