Surf*Mind*Musings

As we wrote about in the PIKII paper (full text), the web has evolved to partially support most of the key tenets of traditional hypertext. A notable exception is trails, or maps through information space, that can be shared, followed, and augmented. For a indepth primer on the history here, see the web that wasn’t. Let’s look historically at efforts in this space.

Trailfire, a web 2.0 company, has a Firefox plugin that facilitates authoring and a playback mechanism with the claim of personalized topical recommendations. Trexy was an earlier foray that focuses on supporting search and uses search queries as starting points for trails. This type of parallel, collaborative search of an information space was most recently addressed with Microsoft’s Search Together prototype, scheduled for release soon.

The most interesting recent entry into the trails implementation space is PMOG. This pseudo role-playing game with it’s passive mode of operation and economy around user attention and web browsing may have realized the concept of trails more fully than anyone else at this stage. The notion of “passively multiplayer online games“, and especially pmog.com got some buzz this year at SXSW, fueled by a panel and strong attendance by the gaming community.

While PMOG has a lot going for it beyond just the notion of trails, let’s consider the history of popularity of trail-based systems with a graph from Alexa (yes, dubious source I know). The winner here is Walden Paths, an academic project that produces a useful tool for teaching with websites - while past it’s peek it’s still a defining project.

Alexa shows PMOG rising fast, Trexy with a small hayday years ago, Trailfire waning, and Waldens Paths also waning but with more reach than all the others combined.

Are trails a good idea? With the popularity of social bookmarking sites, my guess is yes. There is another precedent — third voice, which left annotations scattered around the web. The richer and more contiguous information provided by good trails could go beyond the random web graffiti that third voice generated.

Authoring

The annotations offered by the trail services described here are typically attached at the page level, not the page element level as the most robust specification of annotation requires. Even with simple page level annotations, PMOG and Trailfire take very different approaches to authoring.

I recreated the a PMOG Scrutinizer trail at “Understanding Vision & Web Design” on TrailFire for comparision purposes.

PMOG uses a 2 step authoring process, with step one being light posts and step two stitching them together into a mission. Trailfire has a more robust interface while browsing allowing annotations & sequencing to happen during the browsing activity.

I like that PMOG allows me to gel trails without a massive interruption in the browsing flow. No metadata is specified when you add the trail. That said, the UI for adding marked urls to specific trails (or missions in PMOG lingo) is clunky. This is partially due to the number of marked urls being tied to the currency of the land, so the expectation is that the set of marked URLs will remain relatively small. I crafted a trail/mission with PMOG as I did the research for this post, the buzz on PMOG, 3/15/07.

Playback Subtleties

The area of playback is also a key experience delta between Trailfire and PMOG. Partially due to the recasting of trails as missions, the contents of the trail are hidden from the user prior to playback in PMOG.

Some placeholder ideas for future playback systems:

• Branching: The natural solution for this is a visualization, with additional support for backtracking both from the subtrail and to the subtrail.
• Discovery of overlapping trails: either augmentations or unaffiliated. Trailfire does this aggressively, all the time when it’s active based upon current url.

Additionally, if annotations were attached to elements, there’s are some new challenges about helping the user orient to the site before deep diving to content. Due to cross-site security restrictions and the general weakness of frames, playback is likely to always require a browser mod.

Next?

I believe the key missing piece here for mass adoption is the ability to publish trails to a blog. Imagine a microformat for trails, with creation tools and blog posting integration. Ideally, this could support multiple representations (overview map, episodic rendering with visual previews). Existing efforts have added widgets, but the topical focus of trails makes this type of global include detrimental.

In the meantime, PMOG registration is wide open, though performance is suffering accordingly.