Friday, August 24, 2012

Memento Browser for iOS now available

My WAC research team is proud to announce that the Memento Browser is now available for the iPhone, iPod, and iPad. The browser has been available for Android for a few years, but Heather Tweedy, one of my undergraduate research assistants, just finished work on the iOS version this summer.

If you're not familiar with Memento, it is an enhancement to the HTTP protocol which allows web clients to make requests for web pages that once existed in the past. The Memento Browser allows you to see how a web page might have looked last week, last month, or last year.

The screenshot below shows what the website memento.org looked like on August 10, 2012. You can select the Date button and choose any date to see what the web page looked like on that day. The old web pages come from a number of web archives, especially from the Internet Archive. If an archived page cannot be found in an archive, it cannot be displayed.

Check out the app and let me know what you think. You can also download a Firefox add-on called MementoFox if you'd like to add Memento capabilities to your Firefox browser.

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