Many of us spend hours a day on our browsers surfing the web both at home and from the office, but we don’t really do much with our web history, which could really serve as a goldmine of information. Nebul.us, a startup launching today in private beta, is looking to tap into this data, leveraging it to offer a cloud-based web history, a productivity tool for monitoring how you’re spending your time online, and a social link sharing service. The site is now in private beta, and 500 TechCrunch readers will be able to gain access by using the invite code ‘techcrunch’.
Here’s how it works: after installing a browser plugin (the service currently has support for Firefox with IE, Chrome, and Safari on the way), your browser will start monitoring your browsing history and uploading it to the service. Everything is intitally locked down in a private mode — meaning nobody else can see it — unless you visit the site and explicitly decide to share it with your friends. Or, if there are some sites you’d always be comfortable sharing with your friends, you can choose to add it to your ‘Trusted’ list, which means they’ll automatically be shared. The site has a friends system so you can determine who is allowed to following your browser history, or you can choose to share it into a public pool. If there’s a site you never want to have recorded, even in the private mode, you can block it entirely. If you do let something slip by, you can go back and delete it from your history.
The site is well done, with a clean UI and some nice graphics. By default, the site will present your recorded browsing history in a donut shape, with each site visited represented by a colored band. The shape and position of these bands is meant to recall a standard clock face — the length and position of a band corresponds to the time you visited a site. Along with your browser history, you can also import your Tweets and songs played on last.fm which are displayed as parallel bands. It’s fun to play around with, but you can also switch into a more standard list view if you’d like. Also worth pointing out: CEO Alex Huf says that everything on the site was built with touch screens in mind, so the site should play nice with whatever tablet devices are on the horizon.
Nebul.us seems to have two main uses: it can used as both a social site for sharing content with your friends (and to the public, if you’d like), or as a productivity site for figuring out how you’re spending your time online. In the former case, which pits the site against the likes of Digg and Delicious, Nebul.us users effectively vote on their favorite articles not with sharing buttons, but by voting with their browsers themselves. In the latter case Nebul.us goes against services like RescueTime.
It’s nice the Nebul.us has two very different use cases, but I’m concerned it may prove difficult to explain them both to new users who stumble across the site (frankly I was pretty confused at first). Still, Nebul.us is still is fairly early stages so they have plenty of time to figure out how to balance the two. A harder challenge may lie in convincing people to actually share their browser history in the first place: no matter how many security and privacy features Nebul.us offers, putting that data in the cloud is going to be enough to scare off a significant number of potential users.
Very interesting idea — it seems rough, but has a lot of potential.
You also get 15 invites with the invite code “techcrunch.”
I’d try it out if there was a way to manually import my history from Chrome (only supports firefox).
Interesting indeed.
Definitely a novel idea.
Nebul.us – if you’re listening I have some suggestions already:
1. provide a place for beta testers to submit suggestions and/or findings.
2. upon the very first login, provide a splash page (simple lightbox) that explains what this thing is. I’m still not sure what it is yet.
3. you’re definitely going to need an entire section devoted to privacy concerns on this one. there will be a lot of hesitation around this.
Looking forward to playing around with it more.
Well, I don’t want to tell anyone how I spend my time online. There are lots of disturbing things that no one should be exposed to
You can submit a whitelist of sites to share, or make your account private.
I like it! Signed up immediately… looking forward to seeing what this is all about.
Read their “Terms And Conditions”. You will feel more scared with what you share with them IMO.
Well rescuetime.com already does this and a lot more
I dont think this is like rescuetime at all. This is more of a sharing forum for interested sites or personal actions. I look at this like a more robust status update, with search ability and sharing components. Rescuetime is an enterprise tool used to monitor employees, much like a proxy stuck on the end of a firewall can do.
I particularly like this phrase on their privacy page.
“We store passwords for third-party services if it is required by that service to display the information on Nebul.us.”
Uh, wow. As a security professional, their privacy page is particularly scary. Or, dare I say, nebulous.
As a developer of tracking software like this (Qlockwork) I like the idea, but for productivity it does miss a trick. It’s not just about where you spend your time on line, it’s about when and how you do it. If you browse every day from 6 ’til 9 that’s fine, it’s your leisure time, but if you find that every time you spend more than 5 minutes in a particular spreadsheet you open up Facebook, then that’s something you need to sort out. For productivity, I think you need a tool that follows you attention everywhere. Doing that on your PC is now cracked, ideally we need to follow it off your PC as well, which is now looking more achievable.
Privacy is indeed a serious issue with storing such detailed user data in “the cloud”. However, most Internet content providers already collect as much user data as they can. This means most of the data Nebul.us and others record is already stored somewhere else, but outside the control of the user to delete, edit, or export.
I do not believe that gathering browsing data across all the sites you visit in with a single company is a larger privacy risk than trusting all your emails with a company that analyzes your data for advertisement purposes.
As an individual, I’m not clear on the incentives. If its important, I share it. A pretty simple concept. On the other hand, I can see corporations taking this up as a way to understand what their employees are doing.
Its a wonderful concept – i love it!
Nebul.us developers a few comments :
1.> Provide a feedback link – I’m sure there are many like me waiting for providing feedback you need. There is no email id / comment form to post.
2.> Provide for marking domains trusted when posting them to the cloud
3.> I marked a few sites as trusted, but visits to these did not make it my cloud – am I missing something?
4.> Adding blogger to the cloud does not seem to be working.
All the best!
hi madhur do u have a spare of a invite for nebul?
can anybody send nebul invitee plzzzzzzzz..