Adobe Zoetrope Gives You a Time-Lapse View of the Web

Adobe's come up with a new tool that could ultimately change the way you look at web browsing. As it stands now, glimpsing back in time means honing your Google-fu, with no real efficient way of looking at a particular page or subject by date. Adobe's Zoetrope tool changes all that.

Of course, you can already go back in time using projects like the Internet Archive, but Zoetrope makes such methods seem rudimentary by comparison. With Zoetrope, a user can look back hours, days, or months by pulling on a scrollbar at the bottom of any given webpage. And that's just the beginning. By drawing a selection box over any part of a particular page - like stock prices, for example - Zoetrope makes it possible to scroll back in time just on the selected portion while the rest of the page remains the same. From there, you can make multiple selections, link them together, and turn them into graphs. Let's say Nvidia just announced a price drop on one of its videocards. Using Zoetrope, you could head over to Newegg and highlight one or more cards, then scroll back in time and quickly determine if price drops are few and far between or fairly consistent.

A description really doesn't do the technology justice, and thankfully Technology Review has posted a video of the nifty tool in action. Check it out, then hit the jump and tell us what you think.