How I Developed Software to Make Bookmarking Interactive
I used to use bookmarks to store my favorite websites. At first it worked out, as long as I didn’t have too many. I would start out with a few sites in my main bookmarks folder, until I had specialized websites I needed to bookmark. This called for me to begin using folders. The problem was I could only fit so many bookmark folders on the bookmarks bar, maybe 6 at the most, and that depended on how long the name of the folder was.
The other problem with bookmarks was that they are not interactive. They do nothing more than sit there. I wanted to save searches, but I wanted to create a new search, too, if I wanted to with the bookmark. But bookmarks are not interative. I looked into bookmarking services, but they are also okay, butil you got too many bookmarks and specialized categories.
I decided to take a tool from a website I developed in 1995. The site was Internetshows.com and it used an on-screen remote control (you can see early versions of it with the Internet Archive Wayback Machine at here). I used the remote control to let you change Internetshows channels. It worked pretty good, but visitors were fixated on the remote. Many visitors, instead of watching Internetshows, would spend 30 minutes or more clicking buttons and changing channels. I know this because I would analyze my log files line-by-line, something I would suggest all site owners do.
That remote sometimes seemed to be more important than the shows, many of which were produced with major US corporations. I often think it was the remote that got me those deals. I wanted to take the remote farther and over the years made it more and more interactive, adding functionality to the labels above the buttons. A new business partner years later in 2003 helped me think out of the box and look at the remote as software. So I did.
The result of that next two years was a fully functional, programmable, remote control that could do more than change channels. It could conduct searches. It could save searches. It could take to to a website with the click of a button emblazoned with the favicon of that site. But my partner wanted it to do more. He wanted it to search. Wow, what an idea.
I hired a javascript programmer located in the Netherlands who ran a javascript how-to website. My javascript programmer and I created what I would call PryciseWorld.com (what’s left of it is here).
First of all, it was precise (hence the name). Like a bookmarking it precisely stored website links on buttons in over 26 categories, each with 10 subcategories. It was interactive because it let you search by typing your keywords in the Pryciseworld.com search box and clicking the button of the site you wanted to seach. This eliminated both the need to type keywords at the sites you were searching and you no longer needed to type nor remember the website URL you were searching.
One click of the site’s favicon-emblazoned button combined your keywords in the PryciseWorld.com search box and delivered search results directly and instantly from the site. But that was not enough for me yet. Because the system came built-in with thousands of the world’s top websites and search engines that were 1-click searchable with the buttons. I needed you to be able to store your own prefered sites. Bookmarking.
Allowing you to use PryciseWorld.com as an interactive bookmarking tool meant that I needed a membership-based system that would allow members to set and save their own preferences, including bookmarking sites. So I found a PHP programmer in the Philippines who put together the membership PHP code and the javascript programmer and I set about integrating everything together.
The first thing I did was eliminated the buttons, which were four times the size of the favicons, taking up too much room. That meant you would directly click on the favicon of the site that you could access or search. Making that change increase the number of visible favicons on the controlled from 26 favicons of buttons to 70 stand-alone favicons.
Changing the name to IconDrive.com (http://www.icondrive.com) I thought was appropriate, and for the controller I mimicked a automobile GPS, naming the controller
iWebGPS, short for Interactive Website GPS. And with the new interactivity, users with the free accounts could create IconDrive.com bookmarks that could interact with the IconDrive.com search box to create new searches on-the-fly.
There were other important additions to the general interface. Though the amount of categories was reduced to 9 with 10 subcategories each, if a user had to click through categories and sub-categories clicking favicons, it would be a pain to have to wade through all those again to click a favicon previously clicked.
Therefore a mirror was added that would not only remember the favicons that a user clicked, but it would also remember the keywords used. And so that users did not have to wade through a jumble of used keywords, individual keywords could be eliminated from the mirror by clicking a button on the mirror featuring a minus (-) sign. Likewise, searching with keywords first was not necessary to add keywords to the mirror for later use. A button on the mirror featuring a plus sign (+) would allow users to type a keyword into the IconDrive.com search box and click the button to save it. A dropdown allowed users to scroll through keywords to select and use them with their favicons of sites to be searched.
IconDrive.com certainly is much more complex than was PryciseWorld.com with loads of interactive bookmarking features. But nobody had ever heard of interactive bookmarks before. Therefore, when visitors came to IconDrive.com, they just did not know what to do. So I hired a cartoonist who came up with a character we call “Kromar the Barbarian” — a spoof on Conan the Barbarian.
In a promotional YouTube video (located here) Kromar scourers the Internet from his cave using a huge cavewall-mounted 100-inch plasma monitor, searching with IconDrive.com for evil barbarians to destroy. Not having to type so much because of the keyboard-reducing interactive bookmarking features, we only see Kromar holding the mouse. In the video, Kromar quips that using IconDrive.com to search and access websites helps keep his nagging carpal tunel from flaring up.
With Kromar lightening up the mood, pointing out how to use features and claims of “Typing to search is barbaric,” now visitors get it. Everyday visitors are finally searching with the interactive bookmarking service.
What is next in bookmarking is unknown. But what I do know is that it will have to be functional, interactive, and most of all intuative. Otherwise no one will use it, proving that you can build a better mouse trarp, but maybe nobody will use it. In the end, it took a 15th century barbarian to teach those of us in the 21st century how to get out of the static bookmarking box.
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