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10/10/2001 Archived Entry: "10-October-2001 -- WebWord Toolbar for Internet Explorer"

WebWord Toolbar -- Frédéric Roland has volunteered to build a WebWord toolbar. As most people know, I really love the Google Toolbar. What do you think is good about it and what do you think is bad? What usability enhancements would you like? Would it make sense to build a toolbar that could be used for user testing? What if the toolbar built a sitemap on the fly by quickly spidering the site? What if the toolbar sent data to other people using the same kind of toolbar, in a peer-to-peer fashion? What if the toolbar had an instant update feature built in to it, where I could blast instant messages to all the people using the WebWord toolbar? What if the toolbar detected changes to WebWord, or other web pages, like Mind-It? What if you could hit a button in the WebWord toolbar and it would email the page you were on to someone else? Imagine if the toolbar converted a page into plaintext. Imagine that the toolbar killed popup ads. Imagine that the toolbar monitored your email accounts and notified you when something new arrived. Interesting ideas, don't you think? What would you like? What are your ideas? Spill your guts! Better yet, post this request on your own site and filter the results back to WebWord. Frédéric Roland wants to build the ultimate toolbar. Let's come up with some really excellent and useful features that will put him on the map. He wants a challenge, let's see what we come up with.

Replies: 14 comments

While there could be a lot of possibilities, it could end up being a bloatware if you don't run cautious.

For example, for years I experimented with launchers, toolbars, special folders... until I found DragStrip (from aladdin) , which is a really cool launcher that does the job, is unobtrusive and literally takes seconds to understand and use.

Having said that, my suggestion would be to have selectable groups of toolbars, very configurable, and very simple to add-delete items, very simple to navigate.

This toolbar would have to ve _very_ bookmarklet friendly. You should easily rename, and change font size for easy visualization of many items in 800x600 resolution.

Now we are here, a Powermarks integration would be a great add-on.
I forgotted about favorites and bookmarks since i found this program. I don't understand how people can live without such a program.

Posted by Gustavo Arizpe @ 10/11/2001 12:16 AM EST

I've created a lot of Google Search button clones for the various lookup sites out there. For instance, I built one for Amazon, WhoIs, WhatIs, and I also use the ones from Dictionary.com. A generic one that had a box to type and a simple way to select where I wanted to look something up would be great. Maybe I could even look something up on two sites at once (Google and Amazon can be a potent combination, for instance)

Posted by Brendan @ 10/11/2001 12:32 AM EST

Blue Sky feature fests are fun, but once the dust clears, ask 5 questions:

1 - who's the audience?
2 - what are their goals?*
3 - what user goals intersect with WebWord business goals
4 - how are those relevant user goals currently met?++
5 - how can a toolbar support those goals significantlybetter than the competion?

*important note: a feature request doesn't define a goal, though it can lead to it... for any given feature suggestion, ask "So what problem would that feature help you solve?" or words to that effect.

++ how goals are currently met define the toolbar's competition. Recent case in point - Bagarashi.com's main competition is Hewlett-Packard, in the form of printers...

cheers,

Jess

Posted by Jess @ 10/11/2001 12:47 AM EST

I use the Yahoo Companion and one thing about it that annoys me to no end is that I'll press the PageDown key to scroll down a page and it won't work, because the YC will refresh itself and the page will no longer be selected. If the toolbar is going to automatically refresh itself, it shouldn't interfere with the page itself unless requested.

Posted by Morris Cox @ 10/11/2001 02:34 AM EST

Don't underestimate people's love of screen real estate. Google toolbar is so great in part because uses every inch it asks for, so well. Every other toolbar type thingee that I have ever installed has been deinstalled because they didn't pack enough value per inch.

That said, I would like to see a toolbar that automatically showed the pages that appear on either Blogdex or Daypop 40. I would be able to choose myself whether it showed all pages, or only those that I hadn't already visited.

Posted by Lyle B. Højbjerg-Clarke @ 10/11/2001 02:39 AM EST

I've customised my Links bar with all the stuff I need thanks to www.bookmarklets.com

I modified them so I have Google image search, Amazon search, www.makeashorterlink.com , savethis.com, SpyOnThis.com, all on my links bar.

I love the Google Bar and hate the Yahoo bar (mostly because I can't just hide it like I can with Google). Plus it tries to do too much. Google's simplicity is wonderful.

Posted by Madhu Menon @ 10/11/2001 04:08 AM EST

The Google toolbar is great, especially since I've found the regionalisation features and the ability to one-click search groups.

I agree with Gustavo that the risk is bloatware and complex toolbar. I love the idea of something to monitor changes on web pages up there - a smart version of the IE links toolbar. That would cover most eventualities, keeping track of changes in web sites that interest me and mitigating the need for "specialist" toolbars.

Posted by David Sim @ 10/11/2001 04:15 AM EST

Hi John,

Webword could address some of the usability problems of URLs. For example it could help prevent 404s by checking for typos in the URL, such as http://ww.webword.com

If the URL leads to a 404, the toolbar could look up similar URLs from a database of web sites; e.g. the user may have typed an underline instead of a hyphen, or the URL may end in .html instead of .htm The toolbar could then popup a search results page of pages with similar URLs.

Hope this helps.

Andy

Posted by Andy @ 10/11/2001 05:33 AM EST

How do you go about building such a toolbar? I'd love to play around with it as well, just don't know where to start. It could be a really powerfull custom addition to many CMS systems...

Posted by peter @ 10/11/2001 05:52 AM EST

I *heart* Dave's Quick Search Deskbar (http://notesbydave.com/toolbar/searchdoc.htm), the main reason being that I don't have to have the browser open.

Posted by Mick @ 10/11/2001 11:14 AM EST

I don't think this is needed...

I use spyonit.com same purpose, easier to use, no installation, free, etc...

Posted by eric @ 10/11/2001 12:13 PM EST

Brendan, I've done something somewhat similar to that but on a website: tin.nu NetSearch. One input box, many search options: web searches, dictionary, translation, shopping, image searches, etc. (There's also a command line like interface: type "/d word" and it will look up "word" in the dictionary.) It's 100% client-side HTML/JavaScript, so it's super fast.

Perhaps it could be fit into a toolbar-size interface using drop-down boxes. There could be one input box, with the drop-down next to it containing all the possible search sites. You could use the JavaScript "onChange" event to start the search, which removes the extra step of pressing enter or hitting a submit button. Or better, it could be just a drop-down: you could enter text into the location box, or select text on a webpage, and it would use that to search. Maybe I'll try this...

Posted by Justin Kramer @ 10/11/2001 03:31 PM EST

My only real complaint about the Google Toolbar is that it's only available for Internet Exploiter.

Fortunately for me, there's a "Google Search" bar built into the Opera browser controls, but it doesn't have nifty stuff like page ranking.

(Or, in Marketroid, it "fails to leverage value-added features" like page ranking.)

Posted by Jeff @ 10/14/2001 11:04 AM EST

Something meshing OnlineOpinion and Backflip.

Posted by John Fairley @ 10/16/2001 04:30 PM EST

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