Experience-Infused Browsing

Personalize web pages by introducing highlights that let you quickly skim text and recall names from your email archives.

Read our paper for the details. This is an early prototype of experience-infused browsing, so please be sure to send us feedback!

If you are using Greasemonkey, and find the automatic highlight distracting, you can turn it off by disabling Greasemonkey under the Firefox Tools menu.

Add to Firefox, Chrome or Safari.

1 Click here and launch the Muse program. It runs entirely on your own computer, so all data remains private and under your control.

2 Uncheck "sent messages" on the Muse login screen, then login and select some folders. Include at least your Sent mail folder(s), chat folder if on Gmail, and any others that tend to contain high-quality and/or personal information such as event announcements, listings or transaction receipts.

3 Click Go. This might take a while, since Muse needs to access your messages and build an index. When it completes, click on "Save Session" to save the index, so you don't have to rebuild the index all over again.

4 Under "Browsing Lens", follow the instructions to either install Greasemonkey and our script in Firefox, or the browser bookmarklet in Firefox, Safari and Chrome. If using Greasemonkey, you'll notice that terms on each page are automatically highlighted, and a callout with highlighted terms appears at the bottom of the page. With the browser bookmarklet, you have to click on the bookmarklet to personalize the page.

5 You can click on a highlighted link to open a popup previewing messages with the term. A link at bottom left in the popup leads you to a new tab with message details.

6 If you shut down your browser or restart your computer, you will need to re-launch Muse, which will open a browser window to http://localhost:9099/index.html. On the Muse login screen, load up the session that you had saved earlier, and then continue browsing.