NEWS: 22-Jun-2007, I've removed the old video because the quality was poor, and I ad-libbed the whole thing so it ended up being too long. I'll have a new video up in a couple of days. Thanks for your patience.

If you are the impatient sort, you may skip to the bottom to find out what the product actually is. If you are more curious, perhaps you'd like to read through this description to find out how I arrived at this product idea in the first place, and why I feel it has the potential to completely change the way people approach the retrieval of information from the Internet.

The Problem...

As an avid software-oriented person, I have for many years observed how people use the internet, and in particular how they browse the web when looking for something that interests them. Whether it is a random odyssey of videos on YouTube, or targeted research for a project, it seems that nearly everyone follows the same pattern. First, you start with a search engine, type in a few words, and have a look at the top 3-5 most relevant links provided in the search results. Most people use a tabbed browser these days, so you send the more interesting links to other tabs in your browser, and you then open the nearest tab. As you look through a web-page, you may follow a couple of links, and often you will open several more tabs. Thirty minutes later, you've probably looked at 10 different pages, and you've opened 30 or so tabs in your browser, you've started to lose track of all of the information you've been following, and you are starting to worry that you are about to lose your ability to easily locate all of those interesting links again. Your train of thought has probably been distracted and changed several times, so that often you have no idea why you still have all of those tabs open. Meanwhile, your computer is sending you signals that your browser is using too many resources, your browsing experience is getting slower, and your pages tend to get stuck trying to open new links. You have entered what I like to call "Tab Hell".

As a software developer, I have always disliked the tabbed-style of interface. Sure, tabs can offer you a means to offer lots of information in a very condensed space, however I feel that they are often misused and create more user interface headaches than they usually solve. When it comes to using your web browser of choice the tab bar helps to reduce screen clutter, when you have a nice big screen, but what about when you are using a smaller device, like a net-book, a tablet, or even your phone? In those cases, tabs start to become difficult to manage for the user, and difficult for the software developer to apply in a user friendly manner. Too many tabs opening requires a lot of memory and capacity in your computer, and if you are opening a lot of tabs at a time, this can affect the speed with which the information is downloaded. On mobile networks, performance issues become very pronounced, particularly when you are trying to download more than one page of information at a time.

What if?

What if there was a better way to manage all of these links that you are interested in, without affecting either your experience as a user, or the performance of your browser? How would you like to be able to keep track of all of the links that you were interested in following, without needing to break your train of thought? How about storing these links in a way that allows you to follow your train of thought at some future time, or to retrace your steps while you are browsing? Would you like to be able to easily relocate links to information long after you had forgotten how you found those links in the first place?

I know what you may be thinking. 'I could use bookmarking, or save my tab sessions. I could install plugins to help me manage my tabs a little better'. The problem is that bookmark collections are often handy when you want to refer to something often, but when they become too large, they become difficult to manage, and you often find yourself simply going back to the search engine... because it seems easier. These options can help alleviate the frustration a little, but often contribute to making the problem worse.

A solution...

I've often used concept-mapping and mind-mapping to help me to keep my thoughts in order when I have found myself intensely researching something important. Just as often, I find myself writing down the URLs as nodes in my mind-maps so that I can find them later on. This is a manual process that I have often found to be time consuming, and a distraction when all I want to do is keep a simple ordered list of links to follow up on. I have often wished I could simply browse the internet in a way that would allow me to simply follow a train of thought, then simply retrace my steps quickly so that I could follow other thoughts as they occurred to me and then come back to my previous thoughts later on. This led me to come up with the concept of blending the idea of mind-mapping with the process of following links on the internet.

Let's say you open a page that has several links. you want to follow one particular link, but you wish to save other links for later viewing. This occurs whenever you open a new page full of links. As you are navigating all of this information, a new thought occurs to you. Sometimes you wish to pursue this thought through another series of searches and saved links, and other times you wish to come back to this thought later. Often you'll want to repeat some of the previous day's searches in order to quickly get back to the place you were, without losing all of those links you had saved, and without needing to spend the entire day browsing all of your saved links all at once.

The Product

Finally, you are to be rewarded for your patience. My project proposal is to create a plug-in (possibly even a replacement) for the modern web browser. Users will be provided with easily accessible tools to help them to quickly identify and categorize links, and thoughts, and to save the browsing patterns that emerge in order to more easily retrieve information that they find important to them. This isn't a browser history replacement, but rather a browsing session enhancement. All of your thoughts and the information that links to those thoughts can be mapped, tracked, retraced, stored, and retrieved, and all in such a way that you won't need to try and keep track of more than a couple of tabs or windows at any one time. Pages will not need to download until you actually need them, saving you precious bandwidth on your mobile devices. When you think of something new to investigate, you will be able to store a word or a phrase that will automatically call up your favorite search engine when you decide to pursue that thought. All of your links and thoughts can be grouped, categorized, and navigated easily. 

This project is intended to be a pilot product producing a plugin for the Chrome web browser.  If there is time before my intended due date, I may even attempt to port to either Firefox or Maxthon. Versions for Android or iPhone are planned for a future release, but will not be considered withing the scope of the current project at this stage. Other desktop browsers will be considered on a case by case basis at a later date.

I see this product as a research tool, and as a means to smooth out the inefficiencies of the common web-browsing experience, removing a problem that users may only have been peripherally aware of having, and which I believe will set a new standard by radically changing the user's web browsing experience for the better.

Project temporary logo is a modified version of Dierk Schaefer's "Brain" image, used under the Creative Commons License.