Fetching.io
When his friend Kelly mentioned she was interviewing for a new job, Peter Brown told her there was an article she needed to read. He couldn’t remember where he’d seen it. And he couldn’t remember what company it was about. But he knew she had to read it. And, luckily, he had invented an app that could find it.
Built for desktop and laptop machines, the app is called Fetching.io. It caches every single webpage you visit, creating your own personal search engine where you can search solely what you’ve seen in the past. Brown came up with the idea after trying—and failing—to find something else that did this. “I got sick and tired of losing websites I’d seen before—or spending a frustratingly long time re-finding them,” he says.
You know how it is. You visit so many different sites and use so many different apps that it’s hard to remember where you’ve read what. You can try Googling for particular phrases you might remember from an article, but that’s not always enough to find what you’re looking for.
Services like Evernote and Pinterest let you save things you find for future reference. The problem is: you have to make a conscious decision to save something as you see it. If you just browse an article, not realizing it will come in handy one day, you’re out of luck. Most modern browsers let you search your internet history, but their search tools are limited—to say the least—and if you reinstall your browser or buy a new computer, your browser history may be gone.
Fetching.io, on the other hand, captures every site you visit automatically. It includes advanced search tools to help you find what you’re looking for. And, if you want, you can store your browsing history indefinitely.
‘I got sick and tired of losing websites I’d seen before.’
The app started life as an online service, storing all of your history on the net so that you could search it from any computer or smartphone. But that raised a few privacy questions, so Brown built a desktop version, available for Apple Macs, that only runs locally. This may still be a privacy concern—internet hackers are still a threat, and so are curious family members—but at least you can make sure your data isn’t stored on someone else’s machine.
Brown works on the tool in his spare time, separate from his day job as a developer, and for now, it’s free. But he hopes to turn it into a business. In the future, he may charge a one-time fee for the desktop app and some sort of a recurring fee for the cloud service.
In order to avoid any sort of outside pressure to mine the data he collects, Brown is trying to retain as much control over the app as possible. He’s decided to keep things simple and forgo raising venture capital, inspired by solo entrepreneurs like Instapaper founder Marco Arment and Pinboard founder Maciej Ceglowski, who have proven it’s possible to run a successful one-man business.
He also wants to turn the app into something more than just a memory aid, believing it could help people reflect more deeply on their online lives. “Your iPhoto album goes back twenty years now. You can go back and see what you were taking pictures of back then, and relive those memories to a certain extent. But you can’t go back and see what webpages you were browsing back then,” he says. “We spend so much time searching for stuff on the internet that it’s part of our personality. Right now, all of that gets lost.”
No comments:
Post a Comment