Ubiquitous Places
Andy Edmonds
Dietrich Ayala
[1:36pm] dietrich: so what kind of queries? can you give some examples?
[1:37pm] dietrich: but if you can succinctly describe what kind of queries you want, we can think about the best way to integrate into ub

[1:37pm] andyed: for command line, i want things like
[1:37pm] andyed: "yesterday afternoon I had a big google sesssion, show me all my queries with clicks and the links clicked grouped by query"
[1:37pm] andyed: sometime last week I had  a session looking at media wiki extensions, show it to me with thumbnails
Querying Your History Command Line Style
[1:38pm] dietrich: oh sure, start w/ the easy ones 

[1:38pm] andyed: but i'm finding myself using starring
[1:38pm] andyed: but with no good way to consume those links again later other than the awesome bar

[1:38pm] andyed: so even just some good temporal queries on starred and a timeline view would rock
[[1:38pm] dietrich: {yesterday afternoon} {google.com} {visit-type=clicked}

1:39pm] andyed: {ref:google.com}
[1:39pm] andyed: listed out ordered by time grouped by query
[1:39pm] andyed: query is a heading
Query Your History For Searchs & Clicks
Do YOU use STAR?
USE CASES
andyed: did you see my ping on places queries in ubiquity?
[1:31pm] andyed: Now at http://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/Ubiquity/Ubiquity_Command_Suggestions
[1:33pm] dietrich: hehe
[1:33pm] dietrich: yes, i did! lots of potential there
TAGGING
dietrich: i added a built-in "tag" command
[1:34pm] dietrich: but it's already out-of-date due to ub's internal changes 
[1:34pm] dietrich: but viz of that data in the preview area is def. going to be where it's at

[1:39pm] dietrich: yes, tag browsing was basically cut from fx3 

[1:39pm] andyed: not easy -- have you seen flamenco?
[1:39pm] dietrich: no, link?
[1:39pm] andyed: http://flamenco.berkeley.edu/
[1:40pm] andyed: specifically http://orange.sims.berkeley.edu/cgi-bin/flamenco.cgi/spiro/Flamenco
[1:40pm] andyed: jump to the guts at http://orange.sims.berkeley.edu/cgi-bin/flamenco.cgi/spiro/Flamenco?q=location:116/view_type:23&group=location

andyed: dietrich: flamenco's kinda of a spec for a good tag browsing system, assuming high quality tags

[2:36pm] andyed: is your tag query stuff still in the ubiq branch?
[2:37pm] dietrich: andyed: http://hg.toolness.com/ubiquity-firefox/file/c6ec69a932db/ubiquity/chrome/content/tagging_cmds.js
[2:37pm] dietrich: needs to be updated to the new command creation syntax though
[2:37pm] dietrich: i'm looking now into a generic places query command
Building Better Memory
Cues
andyed: make it easy to go from history to cached content, https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=449229
[1:50pm] andyed: then we could pull out meanginful images or text extractions

[1:50pm] dietrich: curious tho, how to pull out what's meaningful from a blind cache
[1:50pm] dietrich: ?

[1:50pm] andyed: i'd need image size
[1:50pm] andyed: but size heuristics are good
[1:50pm] andyed: lots of publicaiotns on this
[1:50pm] andyed: for search engine summarization etc
[1:51pm] andyed: headings

[1:54pm] dietrich: but yeah size would eliminate much of that
[1:54pm] andyed: ad would have offsite source too
[1:54pm] dietrich: yep


[2:00pm] dietrich: also, another approach i've been thinking about is a microformat for logos, etc, that gets harvested and saved as an annotation
[2:00pm] dietrich: (kinda like favicons)
[1:54pm] dietrich: i started work on a thumbnail service while at the summit, after seeing all the concept series stuff

[1:55pm] dietrich: that'd be a starting point at least for taking the burden off of extensions
[1:55pm] andyed: Excellent, my experiments have not been very performant

[1:55pm] andyed: my premise is thumbnails are not a great cue much of the time
[1:55pm] andyed: they certainly don't crunch down as well as logo images
[1:59pm] dietrich: well, it's a lower barrier than retrofitting our cache infrastructure
Thumbnails Are Easy
[2:01pm] andyed: favicon is a pretty good place to start
[2:01pm] andyed: there was some nice sigraph work
[2:02pm] andyed: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1179622.1179703&jmp=indexterms&coll=GUIDE&dl=GUIDE
[2:02pm] andyed: "Favicon seeded web surfing"
FavIcons Have Potential
[2:20pm] dietrich: oh andyed, a heads-up: you'll soon need to access the places db via a connection object exposed by the history service
[2:20pm] dietrich: for raw queries
[2:20pm] andyed: oh? direct interface going away?
[2:20pm] dietrich: there's a 7% perf gain for opening the db in non-shared mode

[2:20pm] andyed: i'm typically using a db backup anyway
[2:21pm] dietrich: landing soon, we'll see if the gain is actually worth the cost of the restriction
[2:21pm] andyed: seems like the real places interfaces are better optimiized than some of my queries anyway
[2:21pm] andyed: just a bigger barrier to learning
[2:21pm] dietrich: well anywhere you see that it's not, please file a bug and cc me 

[2:25pm] dietrich: trying to move development of query enhancements to js, instead of c++
[2:25pm] dietrich: for faster iteration, less crashiness

[2:23pm] dietrich: sure, but that use-case is screaming for an api for traversing trails
[2:22pm] andyed: there are some joins i'll never be able to do with straight palces
[2:22pm] andyed: self joins to the visit table for sequences as an example I think


[2:25pm] andyed: yep, and going back to our ubiq command line
[2:25pm] dietrich: that'd be a good candidate
[2:25pm] andyed: within 2 clicks of techmeme in my history is a good trigger
[2:26pm] dietrich: yes, range restriction would be hot
brainstorming the
potential
[2:28pm] dietrich: ah right

[2:27pm] andyed: i did some awesome stuff with linkfromdomain at msn
[2:27pm] dietrich: no complicated visualization needs for those kinds of queries either
[2:28pm] andyed: diggrank: http://blogs.msdn.com/andyed/archive/2006/10/17/search-macros-recap.aspx
[2:28pm] dietrich: you mean 1-away-from-click?
[2:28pm] andyed: Most digged youtube vids, http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=site%3Ayoutube.com&go=Search&form=QBJK&q1=macro%3Aandyed.diggrank
[2:28pm] andyed: no this is generic link graph (not history)
[2:28pm] andyed: but similar concept
Arcane Querying
Graph Distance Ops