SUPERLINK by Croosing: Building the next generation of web linking upon OpenWhisk
During the past 26 years, the Internet has revolutionized almost all aspect of modern life: from economy and commerce, to information availability and easy sharing, to social and political revolutions driven with the power of the web.
But one simple thing remained exactly the same: the technology that makes the web “click”.
That was the initial motivation for us to found Croosing, a small startup with a big vision — to take browsing forward. We’re aiming to achieve that by challenging the building block of the Internet, the “click” thing: the hyperlink.
In three years of development (and three patents pending), we gave the antiquated hyperlink new superpowers, and made it a SUPERLINK — a link that can execute multiple actions (and not just navigation), that can take the users who clicked it to several targets (and not just one) and that can escort the users and communicate with them long after they’ve clicked it (unlike the disconnected hyperlink).
Basically, the SUPERLINK technology is driving the world’s-first autonomous browsing experience.
Set aside the complexity of inventing a new generation of web linking and turning a manual experience into an autonomous one, we had to plan ahead and to be prepared for success.
Why did we chose OpenWhisk ?
With over 3.5 billion users clicking on links, most of them several times every day, the SUPERLINK infrastructure needed to be designed to deal with enormous amounts of traffic. After all, every SUPERLINK stands by itself, but they all being serviced by the same “brain”.
The solution was to ditch the (previously used) virtual machines architecture, and to adopt Serverless coding.
The decision was based on understanding that function based programming is the future of any web based service, application or infrastructure, and that it provides a perfect solution for our scalability challenges.
The next phase was to survey the alternatives. We chose to use OpenWhisk because: (a) from the business perspective, it will save us money in the long run; and (b) from the geeky side of things, we found the idea of OpenWhisk to be not less than revolutionary.
Designing our architecture and building our environment around OpenWhisk, allows us to focus more on the business requirements then on technical aspects like environment installations and environment maintenance. Also, setting a fully working environment was done with real ease — and in no time we had one up and running, with scalability concerns becoming part of the past.
And here’s how it goes…
If you want to be amongst the firsts to try the new technology, just click this SUPERLINK intro to OpenWhisk and let it run. Notice: on first run, you’ll be asked to install a light extension to your browser (currently works on Chrome, Safari and most Chromium-based browsers).
At any point during the run, you can click anywhere on the screen and the SUPERLINK will pause. You can continue playing it (or stop it entirely) through the bottom bar.
SUPERLINKS are created easily using a free graphic creator’s studio, available at www.croosing.com (requires a very short registration).
Currently under development, the next version of the technology — Smart SUPERLINK — will auto-create SUPERLINKS based on analysis of the users’ browsing patterns and crowd wisdom (see “Analyzer” and “Recommendation engine” in the architecture drawing above).
Your feedback on the experience is most appreciated…
