Wayback in mists of time (well about the end of 2001) I did a blog post on a blog I wrote called ‘Life’ on Blogger. The post was entitled ‘Blogs.. the future of the user interface’. It was realisation for me that blogs could become something rather special. By ‘user interface’ I was really referring to the interface for publishing content to the Web. Up until that point you needed either hardcore HTML experience or used desktop client tools like Allaire Homesite, Frontpage, Dreamweaver etc. Radio Userland was fairly new on to the scene. I did once have a site on manillasites.com powered by Radio. But that was many moons ago and I’ve forgot even what the URL was.
It’s funny though, at least for me, to see that I never actually finished the posting. It end rather abruptly but has two references to what the post was actually going to be about. Namely BrowseUp and Scopeware.
When I posted recently about the Yahoo! UI integration with WordPress I thought long and hard about browser plugins that back in 2001 were doing what AJAX style Web 2.0 applications are doing today. Tagging, linking, social bookmarking etc.
BrowseUp used to live at browseup.com, but the site appears to have gone. The O’Reilly OpenP2P website still has a reference to what the tool did, namely:
BrowseUp is a collaborative web publishing tool that uses IE 5.01+ to provide a simple drag and drop interface for publishing to the BrowseUp network. BrowseUp adds an “up” button to IE5’s console that can be clicked to display any BrowseUp-enabled content related to the current web site. BrowseUp’s open hyperlink system is based on Dr. Douglas C. Engelbart’s open hyperdocument system (OHS) that enables users to link and annotate content from various web sites. BrowseUp network web sites can be viewed using any browser, but publishing must be done with the BrowseUp application running within IE5. To find sites with BrowseUp-based annotations, go to the BrowseUp Search Engine page.
I remember installing it and having a go, and looking at the comments that people had made on various websites contained within pop-out menus (rendered by the browser plugin rather than AJAX). It was very akin to what the Yahoo! UI comments plugin for WordPress that Jack Slocum has put together.
Scopeware was another tool in a slightly different light. Much is made of search technology these days and Google have indeed done some great things in that area. One area that still remains to be fought over is desktop and integrated Web search. Apple have Spotlight in OS X, Microsoft have Vista integrated search coming and Google have Google Desktop. Scopeware did what pretty much these tools are striving to do.
The Scopeware website used to say this about the company:
Our philosophy is based on the basic premise that information should be woven into a flowing narrative stream with a past, present and future that you can tune in from anywhere. Information should mirror the structure of your life, not the structure of your computers and that it should be presented in a form that reflects human recall:
time, type, look and essence.Fueled by the research and writings of Dr. David Gelernter, world-renowned Yale professor and our Chief Scientist, and Dr. Eric Freeman, Mirror Worlds Technologies was established in 1997 to develop and commercialize the patented technology based on this premise.
We launched the first commercial release of our product Scopeware enterprise solution in March 2001. A desktop product, Scopeware Vision, followed in 2002. Today we have a significant number of partners and clients who benefit from our solutions worldwide.
Scopeware has offices in New York City and New Haven, Connecticut.
It was, just as BrowseUp was, ahead of it’s time as this Google Answers article says.
BrowseUp.com is now for sale. Scopeware.com is a placeholder for a mobile phone ringtone download site.