Dow Jones Interactive Publications Library
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`PERSONAL TECHNOLOGY
`
`New 'Metabrowsers'
`Allow You to Create
`A Quilt of Web Pages
`By Walter S. Mossberg
`
`05/18/2000
`The Wall Street Journal
`Page B1
`(Copyright (c) 2000, Dow Jones & Company, Inc.)
`
`FOR LOTS OF PEOPLE, the Web has ceased to be about idle browsing. Instead, they've settled on a routine
`collection of sites related to their work or interests, and try to check each one regularly, sometimes several
`times a day.
`
`When you approach the Web that way, the standard browser experience becomes pretty tedious. So a number
`of companies are working on ways to let you see all or parts of multiple Web pages in one sort of super page
`that allows you to quickly scan them all.
`
`Some very big outfits, notably Microsoft, are working on ways to change the basic architecture of standard
`Web pages so that browsers could combine them into these super pages. But without waiting for such big,
`systemic changes, some smaller companies have developed clever Web services that try to accomplish the
`same thing.
`
`I've been testing four of these so-called "metabrowsing" services. Each is different, but I've found that, as in so
`much of life, the simplest approach is the best. Here's a rundown on some of the most promising entries.
`
`MY FAVORITE of the early metabrowsers, and the simplest, is called Quickbrowse, a service founded by a
`free-lance journalist who was tired of looking up the same large group of separate sites daily for his work. It's
`available free of charge at www.quickbrowse.com. Here's how it works. You simply list a bunch of Web
`addresses for pages you check regularly, and Quickbrowse strings them together into one long, scrollable Web
`page. All of the content, including graphics, is preserved and all of the links work. When you click on a link, a
`separate window opens for the new page, so you can always return quickly to your Quickbrowse page.
`
`Once you assemble a Quickbrowse page, you can save it at the site's home page so you can quickly retrieve it
`again without retyping all the addresses. You can create multiple pages. For instance, I created a technology-
`news page drawn from five sites, then a media-news page drawn from an entirely different set of sites. You
`can also bookmark the pages so you can get right to them from your browser without even visiting the main
`Quickbrowse page. The pages that make up your Quickbrowse page can be any page on the Web. Every time
`you call up the combined page, it gets updated.
`
`The site is simple, almost crude. It has a number of preconfigured Quickbrowse pages you can use. But there
`are some drawbacks. You must manually type in the addresses of the component pages the first time you set
`up a Quickbrowse page. It would be better if you could automatically grab them while browsing. And the
`system doesn't work well with some sites that require registration, including The Wall Street Journal and the
`New York Times sites. The company says a new version, due in a month or so, will fix these problems.
`
`NOT QUITE AS GOOD, but still useful, is OnePage at www.onepage.com. It lets you combine subsections, or
`parts of Web pages, into a patchwork page kind of like My Yahoo!, but drawn from disparate sources. You
`might have sports from ESPN, political news from the Washington Post, and entertainment news from
`Hollywood.com. The system for grabbing Web material is better than Quickbrowse's; you can choose just part
`of a page. But I found it slow, and it didn't work in a few instances.
`
`A worse problem with OnePage is that it can be hard to arrange and read all those chunks of Web sites on the
`combined metapage. The layout controls are limited and I found the process time-consuming. The site's
`internal canned-page sections, selectable from a copious catalog, fit on the combined pages better.
`
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`Confidential — Outside Attorneys' Eyes Only
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`Dow Jones Interactive Publications Library
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`Page 2 of 2
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`Like Quickbrowse, OnePage lets you create multiple pages and save them for later retrieval. But OnePage
`pages can't be bookmarked in your browser independently. You must always fetch them from the OnePage
`site, which is really designed to be your browser's start page.
`
`Octopus, at www.octopus.com, wasn't originally designed to include whole outside Web pages, just the canned
`content Octopus offers. However, Octopus has recently added the capability to include outside Web pages
`inside its metapages, and when the new feature worked, it displayed them better than OnePage did. But it
`didn't always work. I also found this site complicated. Certain kinds of content can only go on certain kinds of
`pages, and there are too many options and choices.
`
`Finally, there's a service called DoDots , available at www. dodots .com. This company lets you download
`small, single-purpose programs called Dots, which you can keep on your desktop. For instance, one Dot lets
`you look up words at the Merriam-Webster Web site. Another lets you enter a search on Yahoo!. Another lets
`you get breaking news headlines from ZDNet. You can collect all your dots in a sort of dock called a
`"HomeDot."
`
`The main weakness of DoDots is that you can only get the Dots from a limited number of sites the company
`has signed up as partners. Also, the Dots are designed to perform only narrow tasks, rather than display large
`amounts of Web content.
`
`This is a positive trend, and the whole metabrowsing field will be growing and getting better. These four
`services are a good start.
`
`For a special look at how to rig Microsoft Outlook and the rest of Office to resist viruses, check out my
`Mossberg's Mailbox column in today's Technology Journal pages.
`
`(See related article: "Technology Journal -- Mossberg's Mailbox" -- WSJ May 18, 2000)
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`Copyright © 2000 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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`/wsearch&binding=1538304&ST_STARTING HD=10&Search=DoDots&Heads=10&esearch 5/18/00
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`Confidential — Outside Attorneys' Eyes Only
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`DODOTS0026233
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