Slife – an awareness browser from Slife Labs

These guys have a very interesting concept in mind here. I can see this
being a very powerful tool if used in the proper ways. However, like
all powerful tools, if it is misused, I would be quite afraid of the
consequences. There are major privacy concerns here, at least in my
mind.

One example of a very good use is that I tend to work in a very
multi-threaded fashion in my web-browser. It can be very hard,
sometimes, to keep up with the 40 to 50 tabs I get opened in my Firefox
sessions at times. Most of the time, however, I am really only actively
using about 5 to 8 of those windows and the rest are kept open for
referential purposes because I don’t want to go back and look for them
later. (As a side note, if any of you have any suggestions on how to
save a group of pages as semi-temporary bookmark groups, let me know…
I would love to come back to a group of 5 or 6 tabbed web pages at a
later date and continue on from that point, but I wouldn’t necessarily
need to hold those references past that later date.)

I could also see this being used in a group collaboration activity (see my other post on collaboration here)
where research regarding a given subject is followed and tagged so that
others can see the trail of information that led to certain decisions.
This could be an immensely useful tool for training and/or educational
purposes. Something very similar to a shared bread-crumb trail that
tracked web pages all over the world wide web.

Of course, most of you privacy guys know that this is exactly the kind
of thing that could get out of hand fairly easily if implemented by the
wrong people and for the wrong reasons. It could also be misused if it
was just implemented in the wrong fashion, but technology is usually
easier to fix than people’s bad intentions…

I have only one request for these guys… Please make it available for
Windows… Maybe Linux would be easier since you’re starting on OS X,
but most of my semi-untracked time goes into stuff I do on my Windows
machine anyway.