Even if you’ve never heard of Apture, you’ve probably used the company’s products before. If you’ve ever been on a site where you copied some text, and then had a box pop up that offered to show you context related to what you’ve just copied, that’s Apture.
It’s been a huge hit with Web publishers and Google seems to like it too. In fact, Google liked Apture enough that it acquired the company in November for a rumored $20 million. Unfortunately, Google plans to shutter Apture as of tomorrow, opting instead to roll the product into future releases of Google Chrome.
That created a bit of a challenge for CloudFlare, the “accidental CDN“. You see, Apture was one of the most popular apps that CloudFlare customers could install with just a single click. Even though CloudFlare had only offered Apture for a few months, it quickly grew in popularity, and CloudFlare customers accounted for more than 1% of total Apture installs.
So CloudFlare had a choice – walk away from Apture and do nothing, or try to see if their team could replicate most of its function. The team chose the latter, presenting a challenge to themselves to get “80% as good with about 24 hours worth of time”, according to CEO Matthew Prince.
A team of three CloudFlare engineers went to work, and they came up with Highlight. Like Apture, it pulls in contextual information for highlighted text, and it does indeed do about 90% (according to Prince) of what Apture managed on the user side. Relying on requests from Bing’s API and topic summaries from DuckDuckGo, it works exceptionally well.
It just goes to show what a dedicated team of hackers can pull off when given the right challenge. Over the past week, a handful of CloudFlare users have been beta testing the Highlight service and it’s now available to any CloudFlare customer via the Apps panel.
It’s not the first time, nor likely is it the last, that CloudFlare has risen to a challenge. The company also stepped up to provide one-click IPv6 for all of its customers, for free, and it continues to push hard toward fixing a broken Internet.
Because it's so incredibly difficult to make ajax requests, aggregate data, and show a fancy little div. 3 people, 12 hours? Really?
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Likei personally hate cloudflare and they can go get fucked.
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LikejediSwift Interesting. Any specific reason, or just trolling?
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LikeGoogle doesn't buy technology. Google just wanted the development team.
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LikeJose Sandoval
Picasa, Keyhole, Android, Writely, Urchin, Youtube... I'd say most of the technology google has that works, outside of search, is technology they bought.
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Likeaaaargh, what a heart breaker! this looks like it will turn on said feature for your individual website as a publisher, but it's sure not a replacement for the Apture browser plug-in that let users get the same functionality everywhere around the web. I am going to miss that SO much! Also fwiw, calling this 80% of the functionality seems like a disrespectful stretch. Does this plug-in offer up search results segmented by media type? Can I easily see a bunch of videos about the topic, or images? Does it note when an individual's name is being searched for and serve up Twitter, LinkedIn and Crunchbase results? The UX on Apture was really nice. Generally speaking when people are like "ghah! that's simple! I could do that in like one day!" about a company that went through Google evaluation etc. I am pretty skeptical. On some level, I'm sure it is simple, but there's more to building a company than building a shell of features. I think Cloudflare is awesome too, but I am seriously morning the loss of my precious Apture plug-in and spitting on its grave like this seems really obnoxious.
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LikeMarshall Kirkpatrick I really need something to replace Apeture. ThingLink isn't really my cup of tea, but it goes a tiny way towards it!
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LikeConversation from Twitter
@emiltsch Apture was a blog addon. Using the technology in a browser won't the same.
@BLOGBloke Yea, it was also a browser extension as well - so you could use it on any website too...
Bartozone I don't understand half the things you tweet