May 17, 2006
Search Browser History in Flock
Every couple of months I pop over to flock.com to see how the Flock 'social browser' is coming on. In fact, uit seems like it's almost ready to go to beta (hopefully in the next few weeks) so it'll be interesting to see what the take up is.
If you haven't tried, seen or even read about Flock, it's builit on top for the Firefox code base but with lots of in-built customisations and extensions that support all sorts of social behaviour - Flickr photo-sharing, social bookmarking, blogging and so on.
Anyway, what I particulary liked when I tried Flock out today was the search browser history option.
If you type your search terms in the browser search box and don't hit return a pop-up menu appears with links to pages in your browser history that are hits for the search term. (The effect is described here.)
Now this functionality is something I've been after for a long time, though I've had glimpses of it from Google search history, Yahoo! MyWeb 2.0, various desktop search tools, and Simpy search, and I;m not sure but it mayu well turn out to be a bit like tabbed browsing - once you've tried it for a day or too, there's now way you'd want to give it up.
The search works because there's a search engine (Lucene) built into the Flock browser itself, which is a really neat move. Along with the web service handlers that are embedded within the Firefox code (e.g. here's how to call a SOAP service using the Firefox/Mozilla web service API) allwe need now is a lite internal server...
In fact, that's just got me thinking - would it be neat if there were programmer extensions that provide easy to use hooks and handlers for the various public APIs that are now available? Flock makes use of some of these already, of course - e.g. the APIs for Flickr, delicious and Blogger, to name just three - but would it also be useful to provide a mapping extension to allow users to easily embed Google maps in simple self-coded browser apps (or kisok apps)? Or an eBay or Amazon toolkit built into the browser? Or a Paypal API enhanced point of sale (POS) browser for kiosk use, perhaps? Hmm..I dunno - maybe need to think this through a bit more...
PS For some reason delicious via the web has been really slow for me lately (perhaps it's all my bookmarks) so now I do virtually all my delicious bookmarking from my Firefox Perfomancing extension (PFF):
That's in addition to blogging from the PFF, of course :-)
Posted by ajh59 at May 17, 2006 09:21 PM