enter the entangled web:
what is tangle?
tangle is a system that adds features to the
world wide web.
why extend the web?
the web, in its standard form, only supports rather static one-way links. In other words, to link page x to page y, the owner of page x must explicitly add a link from x to y. This manual linking mechanism is high-maintenance and cannot take advantage of dynamic web usage patterns.
what does tangle do?
tangle automatically forms dynamic, two-way links between pages based on web usage patterns. A link can form between two pages without any intervention by the owners of either page. In fact, the owner of each page might not know the other page exists before the link is formed.
how are links formed?
a two-way link between two pages is formed whenever a user exits one of the pages by entering the other. There are two types of links in tangle: entry links and exit links. Entry links represent common pages by which users have entered the current page, and exit links represent common pages that users went to after viewing the current page.
how can users exit a page?
the common exit method, adopted from the web, is to click one of the links in the current page to move on to another page. However, in terms of tangle, this exit method is the least interesting. If users only exit pages using the links in the page body, tangle essentially works only as a "link sorter", showing which exit links in a page are popular. With this usage pattern, tangle still adds functionality to the web in terms of entry links on the page the user exits to: the owner of the next page may not link to (and may not even know about) the current page. In other words, if users only click links while using tangle, tangle will automatically turn popular one-way links into two-way links.
tangle provides two other exit methods, the search exit and the url exit, both of which are familiar to most web users. By using a search exit, users give tangle information about what they associated the current page with, even if the page does not link to those pages directly. For example, Microsoft's web page about their new programming language C# may cause many page visitors think of Java, even though Microsoft does not link directly to Sun's Java site. If users search for "java" and click on the first result link that comes up (currently Sun's main Java page), a link to the Java page will be added to the C# page. Future visitors to the C# page who are not aware of the C#-Java association will see the Java link and learn of this association.
url exit is identical to search exit except that the user enters the exit url directly instead of selecting it from a list of search results. Links created by search exits and url exits are referred to as association links
how does tangle work?
tangle acts as a web-based proxy, filtering each page before serving it to your browser. During the filtering process, tangle wraps each link in the body of the page so that clicking on the link causes the linked page to be served through tangle. This process is very similar to the technique used by Google's translation service: clicking a link in a translated page leads to another page filtered through the translator. tangle filters search results pages in a similar way, wrapping each result link so that the linked page will be filtered through tangle.
since all page exits are processed by the tangle proxy, every link traversal can be recorded.
tangle is tracking *every* traversed link?
tangle only tracks the most popular links into and out of a particular page. In fact, a very popular exit link to a popular page displayed on a less popular page may not even have a corresponding entry link on the popular page: other even more popular entry links may make the link from the less popular page less relevant.
i still don't understand exactly what tangle does...
the best way to understand tangle is by using it. Just enter a url in this text field and then surf the web as you normally would.
who is responsible?
tangle was developed by jason rohrer.