Firefox:Places:Scratch Pad

Back to Firefox:2.0 PRD

       +-----------------------+
       | / Places              |
+------+                       +--------------------------------------------------------+
| +------------------------+                             Search: [                ] (=O)|
| |                        | +--------------------------------------------------------+ |
| |                        | |                                                        | |
| | All Bookmarks          | |                                                        | |
| | Bookmarks Toolbar      | |                                                        | |
| | My Shared Links        | |                                                        | |
| | Asa's Shared Links     | |                                                        | |
| | Top Rated              | |                                                        | |
| | Most Visited           | |                                                        | |
| | v History              | |                                                        | |
| |   Today                | |                                                        | |
| |   Yesterday            | |                                                        | |
| |   2 days ago           | |                                                        | |
| |   3 days ago           | |                                                        | |
| |   Older than 3 days    | |                                                        | |
| | C:Cars                 | |                                                        | |
| | C:Work                 | |                                                        | |
| | C:Goats                | |                                                        | |
| | F:Stuff                | |                                                        | |
| |                        | |                                                        | |
| |                        | |                                                        | |
| +------------------------+ +--------------------------------------------------------+ |
|  (+) (-)                    (+) (-)                                   View: (= | Tr)  |
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+

Publish to RSS (del.icio.us-like service)
Update Checking
Auto-categorization (?)
much, much more.

Comments jasonlustig

I like the idea of "shared bookmarks/links", we should also have the ability to share them over a LAN using Apple's Rendezvous. That way, for example, when going to my friends' computers to show them something i can just pull it up in their view of "Jason's Shared Bookmarks" or something, similar to itunes' shared music.

Comments Jesse

I love del.icio.us. I use it much more effectively than I ever used bookmarks, but I'm not sure why. It might be because del.icio.us uses labels instead of folders. It might be because my del.icio.us bookmarks are public, which forces me to put enough effort into the categorization and description that it still makes sense to me a month later.

http://www.plasticbag.org/archives/2004/10/towards_tagbased_bookmark_management_in_web_browsers.shtml argues for tags/labels in bookmarks.

Comments Torisugari

> Auto-categorization (?)

Picking up some words from <meta name="keywords"> tag. e.g. http://www.mozilla.org/ keywords are "web browser", "mozilla", "firefox", "camino", "thunderbird", "bugzilla", "user agent" and "email client".
From user input while bookmarking (asking for a keyword?)
Creating some filter a la mail filter. e.g. Has the words:|car| append "Cars" label.
Bayesian filter? http://www.mozilla.org/mailnews/arch/spam/ This is really exciting, but maybe too geeky for some.

Comments Bugmenot

Also, the sidebar needs to be enhanced to be able to either float on top of the content (instead of resizing the content area) or to extend outward instead of inward.

Comments AlexBishop

Aurora, is that you?

Comments BenS

To get people who don't use bookmarks much to use them a bit more:

Following on from Torisugari, how about detecting which sites someone uses often and automatically bookmarking them? This would be a bit like the sutocomplete in the address bar, but would place buttons on the bookmarks bar. User-selectable number of sites.
Automatically bookmark sites which you login to, and esp. bookmark the login page (or its referrer). Clearly if you're logging into a site, then you've got some kind of commitment/interest in it.

Comments Wildman

Like these ideas and a few more... Once upon a time I was a heavy user of Netscape SmartMarks which had some very nice features mainly, because it stored bookmarks in a database and could search fast, scan for dupes, monitor changes and update descriptions or "bulletins". It had some built in sorting functions and also let you export a folder as a flat file that your could share, email, or import into NS/IE. SmartMarks wasn't perfect, you had to backup their dbase "catalogs" often and offline (dbase corruption=disaster), but some of the features would be nice in FF-Places. First Floor was bought out, and new owner likely burried the code. Would've been nice if they opened it or donated it to Mozilla.org

Small Dbase Engine
Fast Search
Advanced Sorting
Agent ability to monitor sites bulletins or get RSS header
Export/Import Individual Folders suitable for email, IE, scripting or publishing to dmoz/delicious.
Automatically Name Pages that have empty/bogus Title Tags!

Comments STM

Maybe a setting to change the way we browse the bookmarks, instead of the same old hierarchy or alphabetised links. The idea of keywords and categories sounds like a good idea, but maybe something along the lines of a visual representation like a map or a web diagram similiar to those at the Visual Thesaurus (http://www.visualthesaurus.com/online/). That way, links between pages on the same site, with the same sort of content, browsed at the same time, can be linked up. Users could even start to structure their own links if necessary. Of course, there would have to a provision for more traditional browsing, but I think the idea of a roadmap/web style interface would certainly suit the 'Places' paradigm of FF2.0/3.0.

One key motivation for the 'Places' section would be to have it as a substitute for a 'home' page on startup for those who want it. From what I've seen (obviously not a conclusive study) most people have either some source of news/community, a search engine, or their own company/home webspace as their home space. 'Places' could integrate some of these items into a portal.

The following links use Java or Flash to implement their designs. Could a similar thing be achieved using SVG?

Designs for organizing tags:

As an addendum to those links, I can not more highly recommend the work of Ben Fry, whose sketches and ideas on the visual representation of data seems to be relevant to the suggestion of visually representing metadata in a more interactive way for the user's navigation.

Comments Brkwtzandrew

what about support for css 3.0 including colored scrollbars (;