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eyebrowse | update and user reactions
Today, we rely increasingly on the Web for a multitude of everyday activities that run the gamut from simple queries to complex social interactions. As a result, our browsing patterns are starting to reflect the intricate and multi-faceted nature of our daily lives, but web browsers retain little of the nuanced richness of this information beyond simple “page histories” of previously visited sites. Analytics providers such as Google and Alexa regularly collect statistics of browsing activity, but such analytics are sitecentric and not clustered around individual end-users. Moreover, despite the social nature of web browsing, individuals have little awareness of what others are looking at and how often; while sites like del.icio.us facilitate social exploration, they focus on what people choose to share rather than on their actual habits.
When we created Eyebrowse, we sought to allow users to capture their web browsing activity to examine whether it could help them better understand how they and their friends use the web. Specifically, Eyebrows allowed people to examine long term patterns in their web browsing activity and facilitates sharing, comparison, and increased social awareness of browsing patterns among friends. and finally, to form a public, democratized corpus of web browsing data for the research community. So, how much are people willing to share, and how does sharing impact the web browsing experiences and habits of the individual?
After three weeks, we have over 200 users sharing selected portions of their web browsing activity. We surveyed some of them and found that public web browsing was most useful to them for seeing socially derived information in context of their own web browsing activity and for viewing other users profiles for the purposes of social awareness and information discovery. Almost all users reported social- or work-related privacy concerns and their comments indicated a fear of being misrepresented by their web browsing activity. To help cope with this we are considering implementing a ‘greylist’ that would hide specific page titles, but track overall activity and multiple whitelists, such as one for home, and one for work.
We plan to continue to grow Eyebrowse into a service that supports social browsing through collaborative filtering and other crowd-sourcing techniques, promotes self-awareness among users of both the patterns in their browsing activities, and provides researchers with useful web browsing data without violating the users’ privacy sensibilities.
Thanks to all our users and supporters! We were recently featured on infosthetics!
This post can also be found on the MIT CSAIL Haystack Blog
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about me
I am investigating interfaces, interaction techniques, and visualization methods that help people understand their lives through exploring their own personal information
Check out my current projects - atomate, eyebrowse and poyozo
email: brennanmoore@gmail.com
twitter: @zamiang
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