Preview: Useful reminders with the PivotBar

Have you bookmarked all visited Web sites that offer good bargains, provide handy services, or that keep you informed? Most likely not.

If you are like most people, you just trust that you will find the site again. However, after a while you probably won't remember the exact name of this great bookstore (`I think it was something with an A...') or how you found it and with which keywords you could find it again. You might even forget about its existence, unless someone or something reminds you.

And soon there will be something that can remind you: PivotBar is a browser toolbar that looks quite similar to the bookmark toolbar. In essense, the toolbar contains favicons and links to pages previously visited. In contrast to the bookmark toolbar, PivotBar is dynamic: it provides recommendations for pages related to the page that you currently visit. The list of pages in the bar changes upon each navigation action or tab change. In a pre-test, over 20% of all page revisits were through clicks on the toolbar (figure out, that is far more often than bookmarks are used)

A preview of the PivotBar. It does not look flashy (we don't want to distract you), but it works.

This is just one example of the tools that can (and will) be developed and improved with the data from the Web History Repository.

We are currently improving the recommendations and fine-tuning the interface. Stay tuned for the first beta-release, probably in a couple of weeks. If you want to be one of our test users, drop us a line or leave a comment. In the meantime, please contribute to the Web History Repository.