The Hindu : Business : Jybe: a co-browsing tool

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Monday, May 02, 2005

Business

Business

Jybe: a co-browsing tool

A collaborative browser plug-in to navigate the web

THIS WEEK NetSpeak introduces a simple collaboration tool that enables you to browse the Web with your friends dispersed across the Net.

Let us assume you regularly use one machine at home and another one at office. It is likely that on some situations you would like to get an exact replica of the various sites visited by you in your home PC to be available on your office machine so that you can easily access all of them later. That is, you need a mechanism that lets you automatically make your office machine's browser visit each of the sites accessed from the home machine in real-time. The free browser add-on, Jybe, will be an apt product for such a requirement.

Jybe (Join Your Browser with Everyone) is a collaborative browser plug-in, developed for navigating the web with your friends/clients.

This browser add-on that works with browsers such as IE and Firefox allows an interactive browsing with your collaborators.

To get started with this tool, just download the appropriate plug-in meant for your browser. Once the tool is installed successfully on your machine, you will find a Jybe menu bar attached to your browser with a few buttons such as "Create Session' and `Join Session.''

Now, if you want to start a collaborative surfing session with others, start a session using the `Create Session' button. At this point you will have to give a name to the newly created session for others to join. Once a session is created you can inform your collaborators its name and invite them to join. From this instance onwards, anyone who joins the session will automatically be able to view all those pages being visited by you in real-time.

This collaboration tool can be deployed on several fronts. If you want the pages being visited from your home machine to appear on the history page of your office machine's browser, just create a session, keep the machine on and join the session from the home machine and start browsing. All the sites you accessed from your home would automatically be available on your office machine too.

If you are a teacher you can use Jybe to browse the web together with students and interact with them using the chat facility available with the tool. This author is of the opinion that Jybe has the potential to be used in classrooms as a good teaching/training tool.

In business, one can use this facility for demonstrating to its customers the features of the products on-line. A web site designer can co-browse with her customers and receive immediate feedback on the site's features.

Topic Hunter

A search portal helps netizens easily invoke a search tool of her choice from among the several alternatives. `Topic Hunter' (http://www.topichunter.com/) is one such tool.

Here, in addition to the links to general search engines, you will find a listing of Net sources under various topics that include Science, Finance/Business, Medical and so on. Another notable feature of `Topic Hunter' is the service `XtraGoogle' (http://www.xtragoogle.com/) that lets you access Google's special services such as Google Scholar, Google Groups, Google Directory and the like from a single page.

YaGoohoogle

Though Yahoo and Google are powerful search services on their own right, it is likely that we will be better off, if we use both of them. But, mostly, we often not do that.

In this context, the search service YaGoohoo!gle (http://yagoohoogle.com/) that enables you to fire a search simultaneously on both Yahoo and Google from a single interface will come quite handy. In response to a search query the service displays the results from the two search services in two windows on the same page.

A Firefox extension

If you click on a news feed link (the link with the orange label RSS or XML) with a normal browser, you will see a page with some text embedded in a set of HTML type tags. We have to use a web-feed reader/aggregator to read them properly.

However, using the extension, FeedView (http://www.epigoon.com/index.php?p=10) , you can make the browser Firefox display a news feed like a web page. Once this extension is installed on Firefox, you can read any news feed by just clicking on it.

Feedview enabled Firefox helps you even access your gmail mailbox using the Gmail inbox's web-feed (https://gmail.google.com/gmail/feed/atom).

Nasa podcasts

NetSpeak has already featured Podcasting, which is the process of hosting the audio content as an MP3 file and linking it to an RSS feed. The podcast front is agog with action and almost daily we witness the surfacing of new podcasts from a variety of sources.

Scientists/science enthusiasts among you may like the famous scientific research organisation NASA's (http://www.nasa.gov/home/index.html) podcast feed that contains audio recording of science news articles. Also, if you like to keep track of the latest popular podcast, have a look at the service `Podcasting News; (http://www.podcastingnews.com/), where you will find lots of information on podcasting.

A unit conversion tool

We have seen on-line unit conversion services such as OnlineConversion (http://www. onlineconversion.com/) and UnitConverter (http://www. unitsconverter.net/) in the past. Rather than accessing a Net based service for this purpose, perhaps you may be keen to have a desktop conversion tool. The free software `Converber' (http: //www.xyntec.com/converber. htm), which can convert various units of measure in 22 categories that include distance, energy, force, computers, speed and so on is one such product worth a try.

J. Murali

E-mail the author at: jmurali@gmail.com

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