Snuff: A Media Destruction Agent

"Harris Skibell is a composer and digital designer. His concert and radio works have been performed at venues such as Roulette, New Music America, the Whitney Museum, CBGB Gallery 313, and the National Public Radio system. Damon Horowitz is a philosophy professor and serial entrepreneur. He recently joined Google as In-House Philosopher / Director of Engineering, heading development of several initiatives involving social and search. He came to Google from Aardvark, the social search engine, where he was co-founder and CTO, overseeing product development and research strategy. Prior to Aardvark, Horowitz built several companies around applications of intelligent language processing.

'Snuff' was a web-based media-destruction agent. Its purpose is to sniff out, retrieve and collate 'competing' media on the Web, and visibly and perceptibly filter text, graphic and audio content, leaving its remains on the snuff site. 'Snuff' took requests from users. By culling text and graphics from an external site and providing a sandbox in which users could manipulate, destroy and rearrange these elements, Snuff implemented an initial stab (prototype) at what would now be called a 'mashup.' Horowitz wrote a number of Java classes to facilitate playback of sounds on rollover, importing of graphics and motion graphics, etc.

'Just accomplishing the trivial task of playing a sound when you roll over a graphic was exciting to us - not because it was so hard, but more because it hadn't be done before this, and now that Java becoming widely used, finally this could be distributed.' (Skibell)" -- From Turbulence