Complete: Proto-Hyperfov

This month I designed and implemented Proto-Hyperfov.

Proto-Hyperfov is a way of browsing the internet through the links between websites. You put in a website, the system extracts out the links, visits these websites, and you continue by selecting which websites you'd like to browse through. It gives the many links hidden on a website a visual presence on the interface, allowing you to browse based on the sites themselves rather than the context in which they were presented on the original page. It's a very new way to browse that allows you to both rapidly move from the original site's content and discover new clusters of related sites. Websites become the stepping stones of a diverging set of paths.

Because of a series of technical challenges, I was unable to deploy this project. It was originally intended to be a prototype to decide if this method of browsing would be worth pursuing in the future in a more well-designed and robust system. Despite the clear technical challenges, I'm absolutely going to be continuing on with this project. The ability to browse the web this way feels incredibly fresh and full of potential. There are a series of large design and technical challenges associated, but I see this as an extremely worthwhile problem to engage with in the (hopefully near) future.

The main idea I'd like to establish here is that crawling a website can lead to new and unexpected links out to other websites, and that collating them provides some kind of value. I have an intuition that there's something there, I'm just not sure yet.

As a "Twelve Websites Project", it diverges a bit from the norm. My first two projects were complete, polished websites. The third was a complete site for my own use. This is a relatively unfinished site that's not deployable in its current state. Yet I still view it as perhaps the most successful of all of the projects so far because to me it suggests a clear path forward; it validates the original question I laid out is worth really exploring.

Coming out of this project and moving into the next, it feels like I have two main paths I could take.

1. Stick to the original intent of Twelve Websites; make complete and polished websites that are built completely within a month.
2. Open it up a bit and make less polished and more experimental websites that attempt to test hypothesis and find interesting future directions.

Given how this website went I'm feeling that the second option may be a more worthwhile direction to push Twelve Websites as a whole. It culls my list of upcoming websites a bit, but also adds some particularly exciting ones on there as well. In the end I'm sure it will be a mix between the two but this website certainly makes me want to take things in the more experimental direction.