An Ode To Apture
To paraphrase the illustrious Ron Burgundy: “I love Apture. Apture-y, Apture, Apture. Here it goes, into my browser…”
I first ran into Apture during the Iran election protests in 2009. The New York Times used it in their blog posts about the protests; I thought it was incredible that I didn’t have to leave the page to watch a YouTube video or read a particular Tweet. And I liked the user experience much more than Cooliris or Snap because Apture wasn’t just loading an entire new webpage into a frame…rather, Apture allowed me to immediately access the information I wanted in a very smooth, seamless process, all without loading a new page into a teensy-tiny frame.
Apture has been through some changes since then (the search bar, for instance). Their latest iteration grabbed my attention because they have a Firefox addon, meaning, even if a publisher doesn’t have the Apture code installed on their website, I can still use Apture as normal. Besides the fact that Apture is fun, easy to use, and enormously helpful, the possibility of making everything Apture-able creates enormous potential…this is especially why I am so excited about Apture.
[Warning: college-aged hyperbolic idealism ahead.]
Consider: a living copy of the very first webpage. The break-through idea by Tim Berners-Lee was this type of “hypertext”, a network or web of pages linking to each other, all accessible with the click of the mouse. Genius.
Lately, I have found myself wanting everything to be hypertext-able…I cannot emphasize this enough. When I come to a webpage, I would like the majority of words on it to be linked somehow. For instance, take a recent story on the Financial Times website about Google’s bid for Nortel’s patents.
I’ve been out of the loop for a while (lot’s o’ work to do), and I wondered to myself: “Nortel…now why does that company sound familiar???” So I highlight the word and look for the “Learn More” pop-up:
And then I get a nice window that sums up Nortel:
And after that I have all I need to keep reading the story.
Here’s the key thing for me: the Apture process definitely beats out the highlight-the-text, right-click, scroll-down-the-menu, click-the-Search-Google-for-“Nortel”-option, wait-for-the-page-to-load, click-on-the-Wikipedia-article-and-wait-for-that-page-to-load process. I am an impatient person, as well as an easily distracted person, and so I find the latter method to be rather inefficient. I think even Google is aware of this problem: they launched Instant Search, and one of the important data points they repeated over and over again is how much faster the process is from the beginning of the search until the someone clicks away from the search results page.
So I dug a little deeper in the data asset that Apture could potentially amass. As Union Square Ventures notes, creating a defensible position with a data asset is key.
You may read the next two points and think to yourself “duh”, but I had to see these things for myself. First, it appears Apture has the referring URL of the website on which something was Apture-d:
Next, it appears they have the phrase that was Apture-d, noted simply as “Query”:
Boom-shakalaka!
And there it is…Apture, in many ways, is a query-engine. Know any other popluar query-engines around? (Hint: I’ve already mentioned the 800 pound guerilla of all query engines in this post).
Add all of this up, and that’s why I think Apture has such great potential:
- It keeps users on the page; no need for them to exit by opening another tab or window. Publishers should love that. Users too.
- The search process is quicker (cf. the MetaMarkets post that declares that LAMP is dead).
- It has the potential to make the entire web hypertext-able.
- Not only does it have the query from the user, it has the context surrounding that query.
That last point should be able to provide a wealth of data to Apture. For instance, if I Apture a tech company on FT.com, probably one of the first things I want to see is their current stock and other other financial indices. If I Apture the same tech company on, say, Engadget, I probably want something else (perhaps the latest news headlines about that company instead). Context is the one-up Apture has when compared to pure search engines. As Fred Wilson noted many years ago, there is a new “lode to mine”: relevance. And having context around what the user is querying, rather than just the query itself, I believe gives Apture a huge advantage. That’s exciting.
The biggest downside is that, to my knowledge, the Apture plugin is limited to Firefox at this time. According to StatCounter, that’s only a potential of ~29% of the market worldwide as of March 2011. Even more, if the stats on the Firefox page for Apture Highlights is correct, there have only been 310,719 downloads as of the writing of this post with approximately 25,000 more every week…that’s a tiny installed base. The only point of reference I have to compare this to is one of the top Firefox add-ons, Ad-Block Plus, which has over 117 million downloads and over 1 million weekly downloads. That’s quite a difference.
Here’s to hoping that Apture grows; I really like it and can’t wait to see this team realize its full potential :-)
