Wednesday, February 22 2006

I've been contemplating doing a Firefox Extension as a personal enrichment technology project (obviously extensions aren't a potential revenue market), and have played around with the rudiments: Tremendously powerful, and very easy to take each step, and while there are specifics that I haven't nailed down, most of the enabling functionality for the following requirements seems to be there.

IMG_4078

Before I waste the time I thought I'd put a general query to see if anyone has seen anything like this (searches yield nothing that looks similar).

  • Record and report the time spent on all sites, or selected sites (e.g. defined by regex patterns, or groups of regex patterns), allowing for various reporting levels. e.g. domain, subdomain, folder, document, etc. Reporting could be facilitated via the new SVG or canvas functionality.
  • Based upon the recorded time, allow the user to "ration" their own access. e.g. "Limit me to 20 minutes of Slashdot per day" or "Limit me to 60 minutes of Reddit, Digg, Slashdot, and JoelOnSoftware per week".

Like most software developers, I peruse the various technology sites during the day, and in the interest of good time management, not to mention that such a tool could be useful for billing purposes, I want to have an accurate grasp of exactly how much time I spend at specific sites, or a group of sites for that matter. Apart from status bar indicators of the time spent, and perhaps time "remaining", the product could be more interesting if it actively blocked further access to that site until you indicated moral weakness and selected the override feature.

Come across anything like this?

   

Reader Comments

Cool idea.

I am not aware of any extension which does what you mentioend. But I would love extension like this because I spend too much time on Delicious, JoS, CoT!
JD @ 2/22/2006 1:17:25 PM
Find your insightful blogs from Reddit. Love it.

I don't know any such extension available, would love to see it implemented. Also don't forget there are still a lot of poor IE users out there that may need service of this one.
Ying Jin @ 2/22/2006 2:23:19 PM
Alexa tool bar can be used to track traffic, but not throttle your browsing.

I'm curious why you think you couldn't make revenue from an extension. That's one of Eric Sink's recommended business models for micro ISVs.
christopher baus @ 2/22/2006 2:25:39 PM
I would love the rationing feature!
Dude1 @ 2/22/2006 5:27:57 PM
I've been waiting for this for years.

Please do it.
etc. @ 2/22/2006 6:28:12 PM
I'd love to see this - please go for it!
T @ 2/22/2006 6:41:47 PM
I haven't seen any extension like it, and I doubt there is one out there that does it. I think that there aren't many decent extensions out there, so you could easily take the shot at it and create something new and good.

Whether you could make money on it, I don't know. You could try to experiment with this (who knows, maybe you CAN make money on a plugin for a free tool? Who has tried and failed?), but if you're more interested in traffic to your site (I see good reasons for this), you should make it free and submit it to the sites you frequen yourself.

BTW my drivers/etc/hosts file works wonderfully. I haven't even tried to visit del.icio.us, reddit, digg, etc. the last week.
Peter Monsson @ 2/22/2006 10:19:41 PM
TimeTracker may be the first step to what you need.
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=370288
Denis @ 2/23/2006 12:16:21 AM
Greate Idea. Go get it : )
Jesse Kim @ 2/23/2006 12:25:29 AM
Brilliant idea, you are a great thinker, keep doing it!

Feel free to add me to Gtalk, it would be interesting to meet you.
Javok @ 5/25/2007 12:01:34 PM

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About the Author
Dennis Forbes Dennis Forbes is a Toronto-based software architect. While focused primarily on the .NET and SQL Server worlds, Dennis frequently ventures outside of this comfort zone into game development and image processing. He has been published in several industry magazines, has been quoted in the Wall Street Journal and has been interviewed by NPR.

He is a vice president and lead software architect at an innovative New York City hedge fund back-office services firm.

Dennis has been working on solutions for the financial, telecommunications, and power generation markets for over 15 years.





 

Dennis Forbes