fnid

We see avatar and see how far into the future he saw those animals and they had evolved these complicated neuronal cross species connections. Now if you believe in evolution, then you can't argue with that as a potential reality in the future. In a way, it does exist across species now in more trivial forms, including, if you will allow me, eye contact. I would offer to suggest that eye contact may actually be one of the first forms of cross species and even family. Birds, fish, all kinds of mammals... You can make eye contact and communicate with them if you have the patience. The more primitive the organism, the more patience is required to communicate with it -- if it can communicate.

What I wanted to save, was the number that appears in the link at the bottom of the first section on the cover of http://news.google.com. This number is the number of articles about the "top ranked" article at google. It would show whatever google's algorithm puts there.

But it could come from Bing or any aggregator. How popular the most popular story at Hacker News is, etc...

I tried with text too, but it said it wasn't a number. Considering the one I tried to create, it would be nice to see what that article is, though because of this particular topic, you could do a little research. For today, the top article may be obvious, but what was the world talking most about on Jan 17, 1987?

Of course the Internet wasn't around back then really, I mean, it could have been, but WebNumbr wasn't and we can't take WebNumbr back to 1987 to figure it out ... okay, we could do research today about how many newspapers in the world had a particular headline for dates past, but that would be a tremendous amount of work. It would be an undertaking so vast and incomprehensible that we just wouldn't even do it at all.

And here, you've created a piece of equipment using the power of technology, that without even thinking about it moving forward into the future is going to do that very task, with almost no human interaction -- 100% automated. A task previously thought insurmountable, on your site is being done, right now 300 times an hour or so? Could be thousands, millions, even billions really. It is able to do it with a lot of numbers, like the dow, or a stock price, or the weather on a particular day or time of day and that's very, very cool and useful for a lot of people who track things using the web.

A lot of people have to track things, so they go to the web and type them in and write them down, or enter them into a database. They don't have to do that anymore.

I can understand the technical reasons to keep it to numbers only and why the limitations are there now, but if you'll allow me to indulge in a bit of speculation about what types of things your users will request in the future, beyond what I've already mentioned, would be the ability to pick a particular number within a group of numbers. The numbr in the top articles I mentioned was actually in a span with text in it, but it accurately picked the correct number (nice work), however, what if there are multiple numbers and I want the second one, will it still work?

What about dates and times? Maybe you want to track the numbr of days since the last injury, which is a number, but what if the only number on the page would be the date of the last incident? Like the X's on one of the keep motivated articles we take in once in a while.

You also may want to alert people if the values change, I'm sure you've thought of that. Give them thresholds to fire an event or call a web page or post to a page, etc...

Those are just some ideas. Keep in touch. Remind us of you going into the future so we can monitor changes and keep track of how things are going.