Subject: A plug-in that can view attached comments on web-pages

From: Shlomi Fish <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 22 Aug 2000 18:26:14 +0200

I heard of an Internet Explorer plug-in that enables the user to view 
comments that other users of the plug-ins attaches to web-pages. (as well 
as attach comments of his own) I'd like to try it out, but a web-search for 
it did not yield any good results.

If anybody knows what is its name or can help me find its home page I'll 
appreciate it.

TIA,

	Shlomi Fish

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Shlomi Fish        [email-masked]
Home E-mail:       [email-masked]
Home Page:         http://t2.technion.ac.il/~shlomif/

I don't believe in fairies. Oops! A fairy died.
I don't believe in fairies. Oops! Another fairy died.

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From: Gilad Ben-Yossef <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 22 Aug 2000 21:27:49 +0300

> If anybody knows what is its name or can help me find its home page I'll

They're called uTok (http://www.utok.com).  I got an offer from them
when they just started to be their main Unix man (for the servers) but I
declined.

Pretty cool concept and AFAIK it's not an Explorer plug in but a Win32
proggie. The whole thing was styled after ICQ, which was the inspiration
as the original thinkers of the idea worked with teh Mirabelis guys at
Zapata.

They have plans for Linux (and Mac) port, but much like ICQ, I don't
think these will ever see the light of day but there is a not too shabby
a chance to get the protocol details from them if you want to write your
own client. Reverse engineering it should be sinch as well ;-)

Share and enjoy,
-- 
Gilad Ben-Yossef <[email-masked]> 
http://kagoor.com | +972(9)9565333 x230 | +972(54)756701
"I've been seduced by the chocolate side of the force."

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From: mulix <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 22 Aug 2000 22:05:35 +0300

There are two other companies which do similar things. I once spent a
bit of time with friends trying to reverse engineer their products, as
well as thinking on how to implement such functionality ourselves. 

Anyway, check out
http://www.expression-net.com and
http://www.net2gether.com (Shlomi, I forgot to mention this one earlier
on)

-- 
mulix

linux/reboot.h: #define LINUX_REBOOT_MAGIC1 0xfee1dead

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From: "Eli Marmor" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 23 Aug 2000 15:57:45 -0000

[I'm not subscribed to this list but saw it in occasion on egroups, so sorry for
spamming info and/or no response from me for your responses]

> If anybody knows what is its name or can help me find its home page I'll 

The use of the word "is" (rather than "are") or "its" (rather than "their") can
be logical when there is one item, or even when there are 10, 20, and even 30.

But when there are at least 100 such tools, of which 20 originated in Israel ALONE,
the use of these words is quite interesting.

For example, gooey (or Hypernix). Expression. Cahoots. utok. Odigo. Multimate.
AquaSoft. Just to name some of the MANY Israeli start-ups which developed such
products. And there are many other Israeli web-annotation tools, and many many
foreign (like Third Voice).

Considering the high revenues (each license costs $0) and the huge market ($0),
I believe that there is enough business for all of these more than 100 companies.
There are already success stories like Hypernix (this start-up must be successful;
Otherwise, where did they have so much money to burn dozens of millions Dollars?).
I heard rumors about some others that may follow the success of Hypernix soon.

These tools are also very useful. For example, let's say that there are 100 million
Internet surfers. Let's say that one of 10 downloaded such a tool (10 million).
Let's say that these 10 million are divided between those 100 companies. We get an
average of 100,000 per each tool. Now, if you want to see what Moishe Zuchmir had
to write about a specific site, and assuming that he visited it, and assuming that
he leaves a message in each place he visits, then there is still a chance of 1 to
1000 (100,000 to 100 million) to see his message. A very high chance, at least in
comparison with other statisctics (like the chance to survive in a submarine after
more than a week that this submarine was exploded and damaged).

Yahoo! tried to make a very selective list of only the most serious ones:

http://dir.yahoo.com/Computers_and_Internet/Internet/World_Wide_Web/Chat/Software/Web_Site_Ch
at_and_Notes/

The hot recommendation is: Leave anything you are doing now, throw your Linux away
(these tools require Windows), download one of them, and use it. And start a new
company to develop a similar tool; Many others are doing it right now!
Never argue with a success, just join it!

Eli Marmor

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From: "Nadav Har'El" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 24 Aug 2000 00:15:51 +0300

On Wed, Aug 23, 2000, Eli Marmor wrote about "[hackers-il] Re: A plug-in that can view attached comments on web-pages":
>...

Correct me if I'm wrong, but multimate, and many of the other ones you listed,
are more about online chatting between visitors of the same site, and less
about leaving notes about a site.

> <sarcastic comments about the viability of these businesses, and why they're
>  useless, has been cut>

I'm not going to talk about the current success or failure of these ideas,
but the "philosophy" of these ideas are interesting. I think we should make
a distinction between two concepts:
 1. chat between visitors of one site
 2. leaving notes, messages, comments, and ratings, on sites.

I can perhaps think of one use for the first paradigm: Say you have a question
about a subject (say, "what is the origin of the name 'Jefferson Airplane'?").
So you search Yahoo or Altavista for "Jefferson Airplane", and find an
interesting page about the great 60s band, and find the lyrics of their "white
rabbit", but you don't find the answer to your question. But (hopefully) you
see 3 other people surfing the same site at the same time and (hopefully)
one of them will know the answer if asked. More realisticly, what would happen
is that all of them are people looking for answers too, and probably don't
know more than you, and you'll get a better answer by looking a little more
with a search engine.

But overall, I think that concept #1 is a cul-de-sac. Consider a huge site,
like yahoo.com, with 10,000 visitors at a time. Who would you chat with?
Choosing a "random chat" on icq would be just as just as productive. On the
other hand, small sites like the homepage of your favorite author, you'd be
lucky to find one more person online, and if you do, you'll probably never
find this person online again (unless the both of you spend 10 hours a day
surfing on this one site), so the platform will need to allow you to keep
chatting also after you leave the site (e.g., like ICQ).

Concept #2, leaving notes and messages on sites is quite different.
Amazon.com's user's comments on items are a great example of both why this
is a very useful concept, and also why it has problems. When I buy stuff in
Amazon, I usually look at the comments people write about the products. I
even wrote two reviews myself. People may leave comments on what they thought
about this product, how it compares to other products, what is missing in
this product, and so on - the same can be done with websites, and you can
come to a site and find a note saying "This is a lousy site, look at
www.anothersite.com", or a note saying "what this page says about this-and-
that is wrong, it should be so-and-so.".

But Amazon's user reviews suffer a problem that will probably be present
in websites-with-notes too: When you look at a popular book (say, Harry
Potter), you'll see HUNDREDS of comments. Every Tom Dick and Harry that
read this book and wants to see their name online write a review, and it's
nearly impossibly to separate the wheat from the chaff. Unless some editors
go through the notes, picks the best ones and puts them on top, you're not
likely to even see the good ones, or the ones you're looking for. Perhaps
a search engine for these notes will solve this problem. Amazon's peer scoring
of notes isn't working too good, because the notes on top tend to be read
more, and scored more, and remain on top.

Just my 2 yens.

-- 
Nadav Har'El                        |       Wednesday, Aug 23 2000, 23 Av 5760
[email-masked]             |-----------------------------------------
Phone: +972-53-245868, ICQ 13349191 |Hardware, n.: The parts of a computer
http://nadav.harel.org.il           |system that can be kicked.

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From: Shlomi Fish <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 24 Aug 2000 14:22:44 +0200

Eli, thanks for for your help.

I eventually found a program which was what I'm looking for.

It's called uTok and its URL can be found on Yahoo, in the sub-category 
which Eli pointed to. It enables its users to post static commments on 
web-sites and even reply to other people's comments. It's also fast and 
lightweight (unlike Odigo, which was a memory beast and took ages to get 
invoked)

uTok interacts with either Netscape or Internet Explorer on Windows. Their 
site says that Linux and MacOS support is planned.

Very nice, very nice.

	Shlomi Fish