Google's AutoLink and the legacy of ThirdVoice
Submitted by Steve Nelson on Fri, 2005-03-11 12:29.
Community | Technology
The ongoing debate between who is in control of what appears on your browser continues. Is it you, who might want to collect, aggregate, join and display information from multiple sources using a formula and presentation of your choosing? Or is it the source of the information being provided, who has business, artistic, legal or pragmatic integrity at stake in ensuring that you see the presentation in the form they envisioned.
The latest entry in the debate is Google’s AutoLink, which as part of their Toolbar for the dwindling subset of Windows Internet Explorer users, overlays content with links to content it deems relevant (or sponsored.) Most of the pundits are comparing this to Microsoft’s failed Smart Tags from a few years back.
In the latest round of discussion, nobody has mentioned that the pioneer in this was ThirdVoice. ThirdVoice originally allowed users to post sticky notes on web sites that, for those with ThirdVoice installed, looked like they appeared on the web sites themselves. Web properties cried foul, that their creative work was being modified without permission. I always came down on the side of the user, who knowingly was combining a site’s content with a requested separate source of annotation, and presenting information however they saw fit. I haven’t delved into AutoLink that deeply, but I think I’d come down on the same side here, too.
The latest entry in the debate is Google’s AutoLink, which as part of their Toolbar for the dwindling subset of Windows Internet Explorer users, overlays content with links to content it deems relevant (or sponsored.) Most of the pundits are comparing this to Microsoft’s failed Smart Tags from a few years back.
In the latest round of discussion, nobody has mentioned that the pioneer in this was ThirdVoice. ThirdVoice originally allowed users to post sticky notes on web sites that, for those with ThirdVoice installed, looked like they appeared on the web sites themselves. Web properties cried foul, that their creative work was being modified without permission. I always came down on the side of the user, who knowingly was combining a site’s content with a requested separate source of annotation, and presenting information however they saw fit. I haven’t delved into AutoLink that deeply, but I think I’d come down on the same side here, too.
Consumers Viewing Content Their Way: Boo-Hoo
Submitted by Leon Atkinson on Fri, 2005-03-11 13:54.
Walter Mossberg of the WSJ wrote about this yesterday. The sentence:
If it takes hold, it would start the Web down a slippery slope where no owner of a Web site could ever be sure that readers had a chance to view its pages in the way they were composed.
Yeah, we better be careful. Pretty soon people will want to watch their favorite TV show at 9PM instead of 8PM. And they might want to skip the commercials. They might want to read newspaper articles on their computer screen at work instead of from a paper on the kitchen table. People might start taking songs from their collections and making their own playlists.
People who build Web pages have no excuse for ignorance about this. The Web is all about people getting the information they want in the form they want. If people prefer a tool that "messes up" Web pages, there's no stopping it. I guess it's not commonly known, but there's a cool extension for Firefox called AdBlock that removes ads from Web pages. I love it. It totally removes whole ads. Not even a blank space remains.
UPDATE: there is a Firefox extension and a matching MSIE plugin to do something very close to ThirdVoice. It's called Opine-It. The site is www.opine-it.com.
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Goolge is taking over the world