Comments on: Comments on 9053

Post number 9053

mutagen — Mon, 16 Jul 2001 18:50:40 -0800

Smart Tags Redux a company called ezula is taking the idea of smart tags and running with a product variously called TopText or HotText.

By: mutagen

mutagen — Mon, 16 Jul 2001 18:51:54 -0800

It rides the KaZaa (a candidate for Napster's successor, guaranteeing that many people will have it installed) install, I glossed over the install details and got a nasty surprise days later when I fired up IE 5.5 to check a site I'm working on. Suddenly I had nasty yellow links to a competitor's site. I did a double take, I thought SmartTags were purple and hey wait, I'm not running the IE 6 beta! My wife was using my computer today, I almost laid into her for installing crap that doesn't belong (good thing I didn't say anything) until I saw the folder in my start menu. The insidious thing here is that I can find no way to disable the thing ala the method floated by MS (meta tags). Their site says nothing about that capability, they are going to get some email from me...

By: mutagen

mutagen — Mon, 16 Jul 2001 18:55:17 -0800

and is 'redux' the word of the hour (check out leo's post just below mine on the front page)?

By: jragon

jragon — Mon, 16 Jul 2001 19:08:17 -0800

I think it is, sparked by Apocolypse Now Redux. I'd link to it, but I'm feeling lazy.

By: buddha9090

buddha9090 — Mon, 16 Jul 2001 20:58:09 -0800

I ran into this problem this past week. It actually gets caught by ad-aware, but when trying to remove it, I kept getting write-protection errors. I just gave up and uninstalled Kazaa and the links went with it.

By: Vetinari

Vetinari — Tue, 17 Jul 2001 06:17:26 -0800

okay, so Microsoft announces a technology, demonstrates it working, pulls it temporarily for public outcry, then another leetle teeeny company comes along and does the exact same thing? Brilliant business plan, guys. Who wants to start a pool on how long these guys last before they're crushed like a bug?

By: davewiner

davewiner — Tue, 17 Jul 2001 08:52:28 -0800

It probably *is* a brilliant business plan. Who's going to crush them like a bug? Unlike Microsoft these people probably don't care what you or I think.

By: Jeremy Bowers

Jeremy Bowers — Tue, 17 Jul 2001 09:10:32 -0800

Everyone seems to be forgetting that Microsoft was merely the biggest, certainly not the first. Third Voice's last incarnation did this exactly, plus the annotation. Various people have also accused Microsoft of ripping off Alexa (debatable; Alexa's quite different), something I forget the name of from NBCi which is supposed to be virtually identical, Flyswat (also virtually identical), and a few others too. "TopText" is merely another, rather puny, underfeatured, and based on complaints from people in this thread, unresponsive to user input, implementation of this bad idea. While I'm personally against the whole idea, if you insist on using technology like this, you can do a whole lot better then TopText!