Qliqa? What is it?

Qliqa is a collaborative surfing tool, made to change the way people use the Interntet. Using Qliqa, you can immediately share any page you are surfing with your friends and workgroup. You can see which of your friends has already surfed to this page, and discuss it; or you can post your own comments about the page to your network.

How does it work?

Qliqa comes in two flavors: The Qliqa Plugin (also referred to as the Qliqa Toolbar) and the Qliqa Web Pane.

The Qliqa Toolbar

The Qliqa Plugin is a light-weight, fast-installable plugin to browsers. Once installed, a button with the Qliqa logo appears in the browser toolbar. This button toggles the Qliqa Pane on and off. When toggled on, a Qliqa pane is opened next to the main surfing window.

The Qliqa Pane keeps showing Qliqa information relevant to the page being surfed. This information includes, for example:

  • A list of friends that already surfed this page
  • Comments written by friends on this page (which might evolve to full discussions)
  • Rank, categories and tags given to the page by friends
  • Input fields, allow the surfer to add their own info - new comments, reply or forward of other comments, ranks, categories, tags and so on
Whenever you surf to a new page, the Qliqa Pane content will automaticall change to reflect the information relevant to this new page. It doesn't matter how you surfed; it could be through a link, using the "Back" button, or by manually entering the URL to the address bar. The Qliqa Pane will sense this and update its contents.

The Qliqa Web Pane

The Qliqa Web Pane is useful when the Qliqa Toolbar is not installed. It allows the user access to the main features of Qliqa. One can use it, for example, with unsupported browsers or for a sporadic case of surfing from a public machine.

Using this flavor of Qliqa requires no installation. The user just have to first surf to the Qliqa Web Pane Service Page (a link is provided in Qliqa homepage). This page provides a Qliqa view similar to this provided by the Qliqa Toolbar. The main difference is, that Qliqa Web Pane cannot automatically follow the page being surfed. In order to get the relevant content in the Qliqa Pane, the user has to enter the address of the requested page directly into the Qliqa Address Bar at the top of the page. When the address is entered (e.g., copied from another browser window), the main window will show this page, and the Qliqa Pane will present the appropriate Qliqa info.

It is important to repeat that this mode of work does not allow automatic Qliqa Pane update. So, if the user follows a link in the main window, the content of this window will change. The Qliqa Pane, however, will not be aware to this change; any input the user provides will be related to the original page, whose address appears in the Qliqa Address Bar.

Next: Why do I need that?