Communications of the ACM
A Dynamic New Tool to Preserve the Friendsters of the Future
Credit: Arcomem
Modern websites and social media platforms constantly are changing and updating their interfaces, making the experience of using them from one year to the next very different. The constant updating process presents a problem to those who want to preserve the experience of using a website or service at a given moment in time. Screenshots let users see what a website or service looked like, but they are not interactive. Rhizome, a New York-based nonprofit organization, is developing Colloq, a tool it hopes will change that. Colloq records all of the content users experience as they browse a given website and uses that content to create a simulation of the website that later can be explored at will.
"As close as possible, you're going to get the experience of interacting with the actual site," says University of Maine professor Jon Ippolito, who advises Rhizome.
The tool was developed with the help of Ilya Kreymer, who previously worked on the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. Kreymer has made the underlying code freely available online so others can use and modify it. Colloq currently is undergoing testing and recently was used to record the Instagram portion of a social media performance by artist Amalia Ulman.
From The New York Times
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