Okay, so I've given a few oblique references to metacookie, my latest project to distract me from finishing cameo I mean randompixel.

Now metacookie is firmly in its first round of testing, and so I'll tell you what it's all about. After all, I want your help!

Metacookie is basically a tool to help people who read several sites that update on an irregular basis (weblogs, news sites, internal business sites, whatever). The way it works for the user is like this: Whenever you see a site that uses metacookie (you can tell because their main page will have a little metacookie 'badge' somewhere on it), that site is automatically added to your list of sites at metacookie. It also makes note of the latest 'edition' of the site you've read. Now you can go to metacookie and it will show you a list of all the metacookie-enabled sites you read and, most importantly, it will show you which ones have new content since the last time you were there.

You can think of it like the folders in your email client, where you can see which ones have unread messages. Basically, when the site publisher makes an update, they follow a bookmark to metacookie and it updates its records.

What this means to the typical reader is, once more sites are metacookie-enabled (just 10 for the beta test, but likely several hundred within the next month or so), you can make your browsing experience much more efficient, and you can just keep a metacookie 'remote' window open on your desktop, letting you know when things change, instead of site-surfing all day, hitting reload 'till the button wears out.

So, after all that, I need to add that the current beta is just about bare functionality. There's no design or even information architecture applied yet. I'll be practicing what I preach in designing this site and will be preforming a contextual inquiry, creating a few personas, a task analysis matrix, competitive analysis, and all the rest, to create a highly usable, unencumbered, yet elegant solution. and of course I'll try to get it out as quickly as possible.

For now, go to Metacookie and check out some of the other beta-testing sites. email me with comments, bugs, or suggestions, and I'll keep you in the loop!

As always, thanks for your help.