Revisiting Sites: Browser Bookmarks are History

Cory Doctorow has a posting on BoingBoing about the "Noguchi Filing System". What caught my eye was his description:

groups frequently accessed materials at the front of the file-shelf, it automatically optimizes itself for putting most urgent documents closest to hand

The reason this prompted a post from me is that I've been mulling over the significance of something I've noticed for quite a while. My observation comes from watching over the shoulders of dozens and dozens of people as they use their browsers. The pattern I've noticed crosses all browsers (Mozilla, IE, Opera, etc.) and has nothing to do with tabbed or other "new" features. Rather, it's the disconnect between the folks who make browsers and those who use them.

Makers put in tools for managing "bookmarks" or favorites. Yet, I've noticed that almost EVERYONE goes not to the bookmarks when going to sites, but to the history. Basically, they're using this filing system. They're doing this not just for sites they first visited today, but for sites they visit every single day. I know people (web developers no less) who have used sites daily for years and never bookmarked them. If you cleared their history, they'd be completely out of luck.

This further emphasizes my point about hierarchical trees being inherently bad at storing large amounts of information. In this case, the information is "sites I'll want to remember". It also points to why, instead of presenting users with the "right" way to do things and complaining when they don't follow, we should be using what they do naturally and build around it. I've heard from more than one architect that the best way to design walkways in a courtyard is to just plant grass and leave it that way for a year. Then put sidewalks where the ruts show up. That will get people to use the sidewalks without even thinking about it and will do a much better job of it than rigid grids of concrete and "Stay Off Grass" signs.

So, in the browser arena, I guess what I'd be curious to see tried out on some users is a system that extends the history model into a longer term storage mechanism. Sites are tracked by frequency and sites that aren't used again are diminished (not deleted) into being accessible only by search. The rest are accessible by search, by various pseudo-trees, by the domain completion or by some other method wherein the user is observed and their preferred method of fetching a given url is applied. The trees could be categorized by meta data, annotation and tagging information from web services as could the other methods, allowing easily bringing up all "web development" sites that I've visited in the past, sorted by frequency of visit.

It'd likely have to be a sidebar-type app, but the potential is really there and I think people would latch onto it because it embraces how they already work. Obviously, the downside is the whole privacy/personal data storage aspect of it. For instance, there would be lots of guys explaining why the pages featured at the top of their bookmarks are all of a red-light-district variety. However, methods of opting sites out of tracking either explicitly (no pun intended) or by the same kind of keyword analysis or web service based lookup could easily be added. That would give people, for instance, an option to dump any URL marked as "porn", "gambling", etc. on a folksonomy or in a directory or elsewhere.

We're seeing bits of this surface with Live Bookmarks (RSS Feeds as folders in your bookmarks) that come from the online bookmarking services. I'm finding myself using them (mostly Blinklist for my own use) for the whole "remember this content" problem and reserving bookmarks for bookmarklets, megamarks and things like admin panels to server administration. And even those are resisting tree structures being imposed on them. I'm constantly copying and moving them around because they really don't fit together where they are.

In short, I think the possibilities are pretty huge and it's a potential leap forward in browser usability. Anyone interested?

browser, firefox, bookmarklets, bookmarking, tagging, folksonomies, usability