If you are like me, you spend most part of your day browsing the Internet; that results in plenty of great pages and ideas flashing before my eyes and often times I have neither time no energy to try to save those ideas for further reference.
Thus I am trying to find more and more alternative ways to organize and categorize things I come across daily to make my working process as effective as I can. FireFox extensions that visualize your browsing history can be one such way I haven’t used actively yet but probably I will.
1. WebMynd “lets you fly through a visual history of your websurfing”. Basically, the extension inserts a small tab in the FireFox status bar showing you the status of the tool (“WebMynd Blocked“, “WebMynd Recording“, “WebMynd Stopped“) and a tiny icon linking to your web surfing history.
The browsing history is displayed in the form of page thumbnails which can be organized either in grid or reel:
We may collect personal information, including email addresses, when individuals register to use the WebMynd website and services, post a link to the WebMynd website or submit questions, comments or bug reports. We may also, at times, collect our users’ IP addresses and information regarding our users’ use of our website and services.
2. ThumbStrips addon opens your browsing history in the form of the reel of thumbnails in the bottom of your browser window. The extension has a very handy search feature that works surprisingly well. Besides, it allows to insert comments for any thumbnail to record your ideas for future reference:
The tool user agreement:
Tester [i.e. User] also understands that the Pre-Release Software may contain, errors, “bugs” and other problems which may result in system failure or failure in the use of the Pre-Release Software or loss of data or access by third parties to Personal Information provided to Intuit or obtained by Tester or on Tester’s behalf through use of the Pre-Release Software. Tester understands that the Pre-Release Software may “summarize” or “translate” certain Personal Information that Tester obtains, or that is obtained on Tester’s behalf…
3. Timelope is the brand new browsing history saver that required registration. The history is both saved and accessed online; you can make your profile public to let others access your browsing history (sounds a bit scary, isn’t it?) or keep it private. The addon can be enabled/ disabled with one click on an icon in the status bar. Apart from already traditional web 2.0 features (“Add to Friends”option, Ajax interface, etc), the tool also has some unique features up its sleeve:
- it shows you how long you’ve been reading each page (improving your productivity);
- it allows to save notes for any page in the form of comments;
- it allows you to add tags for any page to make it searchable;
- it has a handy search option where you can search either by tags or by page titles.
The tool privacy policy (love it by the way):
What about the privacy risks?
If you’re concerned, you should rethink privacy and probably cancel your ISP contract. Have you ever even read the privacy policy of Facebook? Timelope’s founder isn’t even on there because it’s so terrible. It’s all terrible, there is no privacy, just long winded legal documents that make you feel comfortable.
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