Toolbox: Voyurl Makes It OK To Look, We Think
Posted by Michael_Byrne on Thursday, Mar 17, 2011
Hey sailor, welcome to Toolbox. This is the place where Motherboard’ll be telling you every week about this or that bit of software that you really need to have on your computer or phone-computer now. Requirements for something to be in our toolbox: 1) It is actually useful, like in the sense that you might turn to it on a regular basis and for hopefully more than one task, 2) It is free, or really, really exceptionally cheap (or cheap relative to function, like a smuggled tethering app), and 3) it is useful to most people, relatively speaking. Please send you suggestions to michaelb@motherboard.tv.
One thing the internet’s proven is that we’re all voyeurs: we want to look at people and we want them to look at us. Not necessarily interact with us, but just know of us and that we are interesting, have awesome taste in music, and are achieving things. Which is why when you learn about this thing called Voyurl, you’ll think it’s totally creepy, but also be like whoa.
In Voyurl’s words:
Voyurl is a browser plugin that lets you and other internet people see what each other are looking at in real-time. when you click, voyurl shares and people discover. it puts the data back in your hands and helps you find internet stuff that you never knew existed.
The idea is, simply, broadcasting all of your internet activity to the world. Like, you go to a URL and that URL shows up in a giant stream with your name next to it (or anonymously). This is what the master stream looks like, the “everyone” stream.
Of course, it’s a networking thing too and you can invite friends and look at just their streams and so forth. (Hey! Someone just searched “funyuns!”) I like this for the very basic voyeuristic kick, but it’s also potentially a neat unmoderated web exploration tool. Like, there’s filtering options for different things like “music” and “technology,” so it’s almost a purer StumbleUpon. Or you could see it becoming something along those lines.
Signing up is pretty easy. You have to add an extension to your browser and it kinda takes it from there, crawling your history for links and such. Importantly, you can block URLs from showing up in your stream and scrub them from your surfing history, if you like. After 10 minutes or so of periodically looking at that stream, it’s been mostly tech-type stuff, so that should give some idea of its current saturation.
And no porn yet, or anything all that weird. Which is somehow weirder and even depressing. (Though this is being written about dinnertime Wednesday.) So, yeah, I’m saying Voyurl is potentially pretty useful and, at least, a bit fun.
Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv.
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About the author
Michael covers physics, climate science, the future of music, and assorted things fallen through cracks at Motherboard. A native of Colorado, Michigan, and Oregon, he currently resides in Baltimore...
