Add free thumbshots previews from Thumbshots.org

Thumbshots.org gives away free thumbshots previews for the DMOZ directory (over 3+Million preview images). Would DMOZ editors be interested in having optional previews embedded beside the links? Here are some benefits of thumbshots:

1. Revive the DMOZ directory
2. Improve web usability.
3. Build trust because it reveals the content of the link.
4. Simplify editors job of searching/reviewing a link.
5. Locate duplicates/broken links.
6. Novelty feature that is not seen at Looksmart, Yahoo.

Please check out their demos:

Open Thumbshots Project

Regards,

Stephen
support@thumbshots.org

Re: Add free thumbshots previews from Thumbshots.o

Not sure if its a good idea - so i decided to check out the demo to see. Demo doesn't work.

No "thumbshots" beside any of the links.

So I suppose my vote (if this were a democracy) would be "No don't use this technology"

sparky

Re: Add free thumbshots previews from Thumbshots.o

Certainly one of the most unique and probably best uses I've seen of the data.

Re: Add free thumbshots previews from Thumbshots.o

It works for me, but I'm using a decent browser (Mozzie 7.1).

It's a different and unique idea, and you deserve kudos for actually implementing it rather than just whining in public forums about AOL's failure to implement what you think they should.

Unfortunately, you won't get them from me. I'm not particularly graphics-oriented, so to me it seems like a massive waste of valuable bandwidth and screen space: and the pictures are too small to give me a useful impression.

But the Little Red Book says "let a thousand flowers bloom -- the better to tell which part of the field you bush-hogged yesterday." So, more power to you (and to your server--if this catches on, you're going to need it!) Is this strictly an experiment, or are you fairly sure you're going to leave it up for awhile? If the latter, it would definitely be a worthy addition to our "Sites using ODP Data" -- even if it wouldn't be useful to me.

Re: Add free thumbshots previews from Thumbshots.o

I say "works", but it seems to be emulating the DMOZ server as of July of this year ... random timeouts and rather slow loads on a dialup line (the last, unfortunately, only to be expected with all the graphics.)

Re: Add free thumbshots previews from Thumbshots.o

Please try the demo again. It should work on ALL browsers except text browsers of course. Please let me know what browser/platform/settings you are using? It's been tested on Mozilla 1.3,1.4, Opera 7+, IE 5,6. If you do encounter some problems, please do report them to support@thumbshots.org
I appreciate your help, thanks!

Re: Add free thumbshots previews from Thumbshots.o

The demo IS for "demo" purposes only (metacrawled from dmoz.org server) and is meant to be as reliable as DMOZ servers. The actual thumbshots you pull are more reliable and faster than DMOZ servers. Of course, you can always download the entire gzipped images and serve from your servers.

If you use the "dynamic integration" script, the thumbshots will not slow down your download because thumbshots are only loaded AFTER the document OnLoad event has been fired, i.e after everything else has completely downloaded. In theory, there should be no perceived download delay. Of course a friendly programmer can also offer thumbshots as an "option" using a checkbox to enable/disable thumbshots for the users! ;-)

We've been offering thumbshots.org since 2001 (almost 3 years now). Previously, we let it roll by its own since it's a dot.org thingy. We learned a lot since then and we believe thumbshots.org is mature enough that it's time to promote it. Thumbshots.org is not just an experiment, it's a full serious commitment to the Open Source Directory. We hope you will help spread the word for us so more people can benefit from this free service.

<edited: removed URL. Please fill in your signature file if you have something you want someone to see everytime you post>

Re: Add free thumbshots previews from Thumbshots.o

I think it's excellent and have already found it useful. It works fine in Moz 1.4 for Mac OS X, but IE5 does not show any thumbshots. Moreover, there is something amiss with the page coding - "special" characters (i e letters outside the English alphabet such as accented letters and umlauts) are not rendered correctly, at least not when viewed in IE5 or Mozilla 1.4 on Mac OSX.

That doesn't change the basic usefulness of the concept. Kudos to you!

Re: Add free thumbshots previews from Thumbshots.o

World/Français looked funny with IE6 / Win98SE a few hours ago because it was coded in UTF-8 by default -- I had to change the coding to ISO-8859-1 each time I viewed a new page. But it is now properly coded

The homepage and http://open.thumbshots.org/default.pxf?trigger=http%3A%2F%2Fdmoz.org%2FWorld%2F (World/) are still coded in UTF-8, and look better when you change them to ISO-8859-1

Very nice implementation!

Re: Add free thumbshots previews from Thumbshots.o

The problem with the character set should be Ok now in the demo. Thanks for the feedback!

support@thumbshots.org

Re: Add free thumbshots previews from Thumbshots.o

Well, I'm already finding it useful! Yet another way to look through a category and spot sites that may have a problem ('cause they don't have a thumbshot). Already found two hijacks. And it makes it possible to "check" a fan pages category without being assaulted by angelfire and tripod popups if you clicked each one.


I have a few questions about how this works and what you are asking of us:

- Are you pulling the directory data live from dmoz.org or working from an RDF file?

- Are you generating the thumbshots on the fly or are they all pre-generated?

- Are you going to keep that site up as a "sites using ODP data" or are you proposing that ODP incorporate this technology into the main dmoz.org?

I have to say it is refreshing to hear a unique idea that has been thought out and presented for consideration, rather than the usual griping. Thanks!

-Lissa

<added>
OK - I've read the rest of the supporting information on the site. I like it!

Re: Add free thumbshots previews from Thumbshots.o

Thanks Lissa,

We're so glad that you find thumbshots useful. You guys do a great job and put so much effort into making ODP a great directory, we're happy we can do our little part to help you and all other editors. If you find other usefulness about thumbshots, please do share them with us and everyone else.

To answer your questions:

1. Are you pulling the directory data live from dmoz.org or working from an RDF file?
We are pulling the data live from dmoz.org only for displaying the demo. The thumbshots are pre-generated based on the last RDF dump available at dmoz.org.

2. Are you generating the thumbshots on the fly or are they all pre-generated?
The thumbshots are pre-generated (but can be generated on the fly if needed) and are automatically refreshed based on preset time. If many people are interested, we can refresh more frequently than what it is right now.

3. Are you going to keep that site up as a "sites using ODP data" or are you proposing that ODP incorporate this technology into the main dmoz.org?
The data is available to anyone who wants to add thumbshots to their ODP directories (including dmoz.org itself). If you find thumbshots useful for editors and users, incorporating it into dmoz.org main directory is an excellent idea.

Based on this discussion so far, I guess we would love to:

a. Get more feedback from ODP editors about how thumbshots can benefit them and end-users.
b. See ODP incorporate thumbshots into the main dmoz.org directory (either as default or optional feature)
c. See dmoz.org promote thumbshots on to other "sites using ODP data".

We're not quite sure how to achieve these goals, but we hope to get some ideas from you all. We'd like to get in touch with the people who can propose these ideas to dmoz.org.

Stephen

Re: Add free thumbshots previews from Thumbshots.o

The thumbshots are pre-generated based on the last RDF dump available at dmoz.org.
[...]
The thumbshots are pre-generated (but can be generated on the fly if needed) and are automatically refreshed based on preset time. If many people are interested, we can refresh more frequently than what it is right now.

Click to expand...

Well, the thumbshot displayed for the website I take care of is definitely older than the last RDF... I changed the homepage on August 26th and it shows the old one, which makes your collection a bit stale. As it is, it's definitely useful now (I just spotted a URL that was 404 thanks to it), but will it still be a few months from now? Could you tell us a bit more about this "preset time" for refreshes?

Re: Add free thumbshots previews from Thumbshots.o

Bonjour Tuisp!

I'm happy you found your 404 with thumbshots! We are committed to supply the most updated thumbshots because we believe in "What You See Is What You Get". However, since not many people are using thumbshots.org yet, we did not bother updating the thumbshots as frequently as we would like to. Once we feel there is a substantial interest in thumbshots.org, we can update once a month more or less depending on the activity of a page that is automatically determined by our intelligent crawler with one switch of a button.

For now, if you wish to update a particular thumbshot, just send a friendly email to support@thumbshots.org


Stephen

Re: Add free thumbshots previews from Thumbshots.o

It is definitely a nifty idea. Like some of the others, though, I'm not seeing any thumbnail images using IE 5.5 on Mac 9.2.2.

Personally, while I think it is a great idea (and I hope that someone makes good use of it or that we just continue to be able to use it through open.thumbshots.org), I can't imagine it being incorporated into the dmoz.org web site itself -- dmoz.org as a low-bandwidth site is useable by a large percentage of the planet; adding that many graphics to it would make many categories virtually unloadable to anyone running a lower end machine and/or dial up Internet connection.

Re: Add free thumbshots previews from Thumbshots.o

Motsa,

There was a minor Javascript issue with IE on Macintosh machines. This should be fixed but not necessarily optimized yet. You should be able to view thumbshots now on IE Macintosh. If you still have problems with IE on Mac, please email directly to support@thumbshots.org

Your concerns about low-bandwidth are understandable. We have performed usability tests with thumbshots on 28kbps and 56kbps dial-up modems. Users didn't perceive any slow down because thumbshots are always loaded last when everything else has completely downloaded and rendered. Unfortunately, IE Mac users are not able to take advantage of this feature yet until the Javascript for IE Mac has been optimized.

Thumbshots can be offered on dmoz.org, whereby a user can enable/disable thumbshots using a checkbox for example.

Stephen

Re: Add free thumbshots previews from Thumbshots.o

>thumbshots are always loaded last when everything else has completely downloaded and rendered.

Yes, I see that happening. Another nice touch in what looks like a very well-thought-out concept. And it is working better now. (I'm on Mozilla 1.4.)

Re: Add free thumbshots previews from Thumbshots.o

I can't imagine it being incorporated into the dmoz.org web site itself

Click to expand...

I agree we wouldn't do this for the main (only) view of the directory. But I can certainly see this being offered as a toggle. It could either be set up to switch over to thumbshots.org similar to the green Google ball, or it could be set up as simply a different view on dmoz.org (for example in a show/no-show thumbshots toggle at the top of the page.) I think that the display of the thumbshots adds value in a similar fashion to Google's display of pagerank and sorting.

Re: Add free thumbshots previews from Thumbshots.o

Excellent and useful idea!

Worked fine with IE6, I just had some display problems with Mozilla 1.3. Instead of having each image and description on a different line (after the line break), one under each other, I had them kind of nested like
Image 1 : Description
-------- Image 2 : Description
--------------- Image 3 : Description
Image 4 : Description
Image 5 : Description
---- Image 6 : Description
etc.

I don't know if I'm the only one having this. The table tag is closed after the image. Maybe a code like
<br><table><tr><td>Thumbnail</td><td>ODP Title and Description</td></tr></table>
for each line would be more browser compatible.

Another point is that when it comes to pages using Flash only the thumbnail is empty. I understand that it may be complicated to generate a thumbnail of a Flash page, but if you can detect the use of Flash, combined with very little HTML code on a page, then it might be a good idea to use a standard 'This site uses Flash' thumbnail. This is just a suggestion, what you're doing helps, with or without the Flash problem.

Re: Add free thumbshots previews from Thumbshots.o

Senox,

Thanks for the feedback. Wow! We didn't expect so many people were interested in thumbshots.org. The crude demo we built was just a rough showcase of thumbshots and dmoz (it's a little 15 minutes script glued together to metacrawl dmoz.org and was not supposed to be perfect). Looking from our logs, quite a large number of people are now using it seriously. We better clean it up and make it look pretty!

We fixed the overlap by adding an extra <br> before the thumbshot. Ultimately, it would be nice if dmoz.org officially supports thumbshots.org because the integration can be much cleaner.

As for the flash, we have working codes that can generate thumbshot on pages with flash content. We don't enable flash support by default in anticipation of code changes because of the pending patent issue between Microsoft and Eolas.

Thanks again!

Stephen