When you get a newspaper, you can cut out an article and come back and read the same thing later. It doesn’t change after you read it. The web isn’t like that. The article you read today, may not be around tomorrow or the version that is here tomorrow may be very different from what you have today.
Capsul8 is a startup that solves this problem by giving you a simple way to take a snapshot of a web page and collect these snapshots into a “capsule” where each web page is a different “chapter” that you can easily navigate through and share.
Some of the capsules listed on the Capsul8 home page include:
- A collection of web pages paying tribute to Steve Jobs.
- Articles about the artist known as Bansky.
- The front page of the final publication of News of the World along with its Wikipedia entry and other news stories.
Capsul8 captures the html and images from a web page, so even if the site changes or is taken offline, you have an accurate view of what it looked like when you added it to your capsule. It currently doesn’t snapshot videos and flash media, but it will embed them. So a YouTube video will still show up unless it is taken off of YouTube.
In playing around with Capsul8, I thought of a few use cases that would be helpful to me:
- I try to keep track of what people see when they search for my name. I could create a capsule for each search engine and add a snapshot every year. Then I could easily walk through them to see how they changed over time.
- I wish I could go back and see how Productivity501 has looked over its many iterations. I can do some of this through www.archive.org, but it doesn’t always work.
- When Productivity501 gets mentioned in the press or on another website, it would be nice to capture that in a way that wouldn’t disappear in the future.
- I occasionally run across a website with a funny mistake on it. Right now I’ll just take a screenshot, but I could see using Capsul8 for this type of thing.
The service is still in beta and while you can browse the public capsules the actual service is invite only. Capsul8 has graciously offered to give 100 invites to Productivity501 readers that want to check it out. You can sign up with the form below. (If you are reading this in an email or feed reader, you may need to click through to Productivity501 to use the form.)