Haystack Blog

We’ve launched a service for letting people share, in real time, what pages they’re looking at on the web.  Our system, eyebrowse, lets the person choose exactly what sites they want to share their viewing patterns about, and eyebrowse does the rest — producing statistical visualisations of your web browsing habits over time, compared to your friends and the world.  It’s called “eyebrowse” and is available here:

http://eyebrowse.csail.mit.edu

It currently requires Firefox/Iceweasel and works on all major platforms.  All data that is collected is public and available to anyone who wants it (we do not horde or claim to own any of your data. We like Twitter’s model.)  We will soon provide a nice interface with daily tarballs of the database in RDF, XML and CSV.

Why would you want to share your web trails?

1. For Science!  It’s not fair that certain Search Engine Companies can do web trail research because they have access to massive repositories of data.  There should be public corpora for IR researchers around the world.  And these should be OPEN.

2. For your friends!  You look at lots of cool stuff on the web every day.  You might not think of explicitly sharing every single thing you read.  Eyebrowse is lightweight enough that you just have to tell it once per site you want to share.  I’ve already discovered tons of weird things that my friends are looking at that they would not have bothered to share explicitly.

3. To understand your own browsing habits.  How many times do you read ACM/IEEE every day? I bet you don’t know. Now you can get quantitative statistics and visualise long-term journal revisitation patterns – and other things.

Will it violate my privacy?

1. We give you control.  You have to tell eyebrowse explicitly what you want to share on a site-by-site (host) basis. You can take things off the whitelist at any time.  You can also go back and delete things that it has logged in the past all through our web interface.   It also respects Private Browsing (aka pornmode) and will not log any data regardless during this mode.

2. It fosters contemplation/awareness: We are trying to also raise awareness of what OTHERS (e.g. Google Analytics) are collecting about you as you surf the web, by showing you what you can learn from yourself by selectively publishing your own data feeds.

By letting people selectively publish web trails in an open, non-invasive way, we are hoping to foster a discussion of how we can use our web browsing behavior to build more adaptive and effective interfaces that respect people’s privacy.

Feedback is appreciated.  Please email us directly at : eyebrowse@csail.mit.edu

Oh and eyebrowse is free and open source software, licensed under the MIT License.  The source is available as part of the list-it codebase here: http://code.google.com/p/list-it