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by Ian Bicking.
Original Post: A Product Journal: As A Building Block
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I teeter between thinking big about PageShot and thinking small. The benefit of thinking small is: how can this tool provide value to people who wouldn’t know if it would provide any value? And: how do we get it done?
Still I can’t help but thinking big too. The web gave us this incredible way to talk about how we experience the web: the URL. An incredible amount of stuff has been built on that, search and sharing and archiving and ways to draw people into content and let people skim. Indexes, summaries, APIs, and everyone gets to mint their own URLs and accept anyone else’s URLs, pointing to anything.
But not everyone gets to mint URLs. Developers and site owners get to do that. If something doesn’t have a URL, you can’t point to it. And every URL is a pointer, a kind of promise that the site owner has to deliver on, and sometimes doesn’t choose to, or they lose interest.
I want PageShot to give a capability to users, the ability to address anything, because PageShot captures the state of any page at a moment, not an address so someone else can try to recreate that page. The frozen page that PageShot saves is handy for things like capturing or highlighting parts of the page, which I think is the feature people will find attractive, but that’s just a subset of what you might want to do with a snapshot of web content. So I also hope it will be a building block. When you put content into PageShot, you will know it is well formed, you will know it is static and available, you can point to exact locations and recover those locations later. And all via a tool that is accessible to anyone, not just developers. I think there are neat things to be built on that. (And if you do too, I’d be interested in hearing about your thoughts.)
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