Versionista monitors changes to regular web sites, in an extremely similar fashion to wiki history tracking. And no wonder, creator Peter Bray of Portland told Wired magazine that his inspiration was Wikipedia’s system of transparent editing. The service first came to attention when John McCain’s campaign used it to try and wound the Obama camp over changes to the wording of his Iraq war policy. Others in turn have used to spotlight changes on McCain’s site. Whatever the use, the ability to apply this facet of the wiki way to regular websites and political organizations is a big step forward in terms of transparency and the further wikification of the web.
Unfortunately, one of the best things about real wiki history, the fact that it’s available to everyone who visits a page on a wiki, doesn’t yet apply to Versionista. As Silicon Florist pointed out, a basic subscription of $200 a year for just 30 URLs is fairly expensive. I consider it a grave misstep for them to charge fees at all to use the service. Better to do as Virgil Griffith did over at WikiScanner: open up the service to anyone, generate more usage and news buzz, and use AdSense (WikiScanner doesn’t) if you’re looking for a profit. Versionista is still going to get a fair number of paid subscribers itching to use it, but only so long as they are the only game in town. All someone need do is set up a competitor using the model above, and Versionista will vanish.
July 28, 2008 at 3:03 pm
If only the Wayback Machine didn’t have such a lag on it, it would be an excellent free alternative, given that it indexes popular sites pretty frequently:
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.barackobama.com/index.php
July 28, 2008 at 11:09 pm
I went to school with Peter, he’s one smart dude. He’s also run an excellent blog for some time now, LandUseWatch.org, about the politics of land use in Oregon.
August 18, 2008 at 5:59 pm
Thanks for the comments. The only problem, of course, with opening Versionista up for totally free use is that we would soon be tracking every site on the Internet, and that would become quite burdensome.
There are ways around this, I suppose, such as deleting archives if the person doesn’t frequently login, etc.
The other issue is that we would frequently be tracking the SAME site multiple times… this is because we have the notion of filters, allowing users to ignore, for example, certain things. This is especially useful for the Obama/McCain sites, where there are oft-changing sidebars, etc.
But your point is a good one, and we are thinking about how to change things up a bit. At the very least we might as well make the Obama/McCain data available to all…
August 20, 2008 at 12:08 pm
@Peter Bray
You make a good point about scalability there, services like Twitter have certainly been hurt at times by just such an effect. That said, such overwhelming interest that you have to scramble to keep up with the user demand sounds like the beginnings of success to me. Using the Twitter example again, it’s one rumor that Twitter’s model is to eventually start a subscription for heavy users. Since they’ve kept it open and free for long enough to get scads of people totally hooked on the service, there’s going to be an inevitable percentage of users who would be willing to pay to continue using it. The so-called “crack model” might be useful if applied to Versionista as well.