20th
Kite
Imagine you’re standing in Virgin Megastore, and you see a new videogame you haven’t played before. You’re not sure if you really want to lay down £40 for it. If you were near your computer you could easily search for reviews. You try searching on your mobile phone, but the process becomes frustrating.
Then you wonder if the HMV a few streets away are selling it cheaper. And what about Amazon?
We built Kite to solve this problem. The goal of the project is to explore ways of liberating the web in a phone-friendly manner.
The idea is the opposite of typical mobile search projects: instead of trying to cram everything into a small screen we slice out what you really need.
Therefore, “Kites” are actually pockets of functionality that extract data from a page. I wrote a kite that takes prices of a few web-based shops, and another that takes scores off review websites.
We added all the kites we need when we’re out and about in London: price searches for the shops we frequent and scores on metacritic.
This in itself isn’t revolutionary, but one aspect is very interesting to us: the technology behind Kites has been designed so that we can open it up to the public. That way it will be possible for people to add their own kites to the system, with various security measures in place to prevent anything dangerous from happening.
Before this happens, we’d like to know what people think. Is the mobile web ready for a user-driven search system like this?
By the way, Kite’s already helped me out a few times during shopping expeditions to London—the first time I used it was great because it saved me £30!
