Back, I say!

Good question: Is it possible for the back button to escape the browser?

I read a lot on the web and increasingly it's becoming a social activity. Links come from all directions: Email, Twitter, RSS feeds, IM, Facebook and surprise surprise, other webpages. These links are the stuff of many of conversations we share, and a great thing about the web is the friction for the conversation to move across the various internet technologies is minimal. The URL breaks all the boundaries. In theory anyway.

On my Mac when I click a button to pass a link from one application to another, it's up to me to remember where it came from, which conversation it was central to and who and where I should direct my response to regarding it. This mental load heavier on an iPad [or iPod Touch in my case] when you can't leave the window of the first application visibly open as a reminder.

I kinda, sorta address this problem when I write weblog posts with a bit of help from an Applescript that in turn runs some Javascript to grab the page URL and referrer URL for the current tab and insert them into my weblog post template, but that's limited to items I've opened in my browser.¹ It'd be really nice to have a helper application² sitting in the background and acting as a man-in-the-middle, gathering this sort of 'application referrer' information as a matter of course and making it available to other programs.

[Via Inessential.com]

1. I could probably adapt the script to pull the same trick with pages I opened in NetNewsWire, but my workflow generally involves skimming my feeds in NetNewsWire to find stuff I want to read and then opening those pages in Safari, so the need doesn't arise. ↩
2. Perhaps acting as a local HTTP proxy server? ↩