Get rid of tabs and windows! Make the web your home page!

Maps can be different things:
* A map of the neighbourhood - from a page you're visiting, you get a graph of the pages you have visited on the site, with arrows to the pages you came from when entering the site, and the links you followed going out of the site. If you visit the site often, the old pages you visited there are represented smaller or shaded (if they are nearby), or hidden, so as not to crowd the display.
* A map of sites - like a map of neighborhood zoomed out. Only one page per site is shown, but you see more sites.
* A map of favourites - shows the pages you have rated highest. There can be many, so you can use a tag (communities) to filter them. Another way of filtering is showing only a certain period of time. You can do the same with sites and tags instead of pages. You can use this as your home page.

What does a page look like? It can be represented as a thumbnail, or as a snippet of text, or it's title, or the text on the link your used to get there. If you're not looking at a website in particular, thumbnails are great, but on the same website titles are better. On websites where the title doesn't change, the link text can do. If the page is currently open, it is highlighted.

What are nearby pages? These are pages that are on the same site, or a few links away, that you visited in the same lapse of time, or that share a tag.

What is a high-rated page? It is a page that has a description attached to it, a few tags, and that you visit quite often. And you can rate a page higher explicitly. A high-rated site is a site that has some high-rated pages.

This map system can in fact replace tabs, that consume some memory and get crowded after a while. if you have too much tabs, you can choose to «minimize them to map», that is, write a quick description, a few tags, and replace them by one map.

Can you draw your own maps? By creating a tag, and applying it to a small cluster of pages, you can make these pages nearer on the map.

Can you write comments on a map? Since in fact there is really just one map seen from different angles, it is difficult to write something on it. But it is easy to attach a small writeup to a tag, highlighting some of the pages that it contains; this tag will become more important in your favourites map.
-- Tobu, Jun 12 2005

WorldWideWeb http://www.w3.org/P...e/WorldWideWeb.html
-- the browser. [reensure, Jun 12 2005]

An Atlas of Cyberspaces: Website Maps http://www.cybergeo...tlas/web_sites.html
Pretty to look at - but sometimes pretty things aren't easy to interact with. [jutta, Jun 13 2005]

An Atlas of Cyberspaces: Surf Maps http://www.cybergeo...org/atlas/surf.html
Maybe a little closer to what you mean. This stuff is all about ten years out of date, though. [jutta, Jun 13 2005]

Gallery-like http://topos.tobu.f...b-export/index.html
mockup (selected from history, screenshots, gallery). I shall now have to edit the idea a wee bit though. [Tobu, Jun 13 2005]

This exists, in a form. Problem is, backing far enough away from it to see it is somewhat disorienting.
-- reensure, Jun 12 2005


Ha! According to the link the WorldWideWeb is actually a browser. I knew it!

Back then, the browser was derived from an editor. So I suppose you could just write down what you found in a page, and that was the map. I actually do this with a wiki home-page. For the lazy, automatically generating the map is certainly niftier.
-- Tobu, Jun 12 2005


To the youth, those NeXt systems mentioned in the link were transitional desktops -- they nearly made mainstream impact but were outpaced by clones and Wi*dow development.
-- reensure, Jun 12 2005


Sounds like interface metaphor with no purpose to me. There's nothing to suggest that a set of web pages will be able to be represented by a graphical map or that this representation will be any more understandable than any other representation.
-- hippo, Jun 13 2005


Right. As I see it, this replaces your history log with a map; a visual representation of your browsing pattern with links shown as points on a map. Mindnumbing, with the risk of lateral hits to nearby domains.
-- reensure, Jun 13 2005



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