Goggles

Confirmed 52,456

About

Goggles is an open source Javascript tool that can be saved to a user's bookmarks. When the user clicks on the bookmark while looking at any website, a paintbrush tool pops up. The user can then draw all over the page and also see art left by other users, only viewable once the script is active. This is not to be confused with Google Goggles, a downloadable image recognition application used for reverse image search.

History

Goggles^[1] was created by a student called "gcr" as a final project for an art class. When the assignment was handed in that winter, 4300 users had visited the site and 3700 pages had been Goggled.

It is currently hosted and maintained by Synapse Software.^[2] The earliest activity on gcr's GitHub page was on November 21, 2010.^[3] Three days later, he uploaded a demonstration of the script to YouTube. The idea was to mimic Hoodwinkd^[4], a tool that allowed its users to add commentary to websites that didn't have comments enabled on them.^[5]

Features

Once the bookmark is clicked, the user is given two toolbars: color choices and paintbrush size. They can then treat the page like a canvas. All other graffiti also is shown. Since the tool has bugs, simple dots cannot be erased from the website, so "dotting" is a popular trolling method.

Highlights

The only official marketing gcr put up included the YouTube video and a thread on the Lights forum on November 26th, 2010.^[6] The site has been posted to Reddit on several occasions, with the earliest post on December 3rd, 2010, but never received more than 21 upvotes.^[7] On December 10, 2010, geeksugar reviewed the script as their Website of the Day.^[8] By September 2011, 206,448 unique websites had Goggles-driven artwork on them. The main site keeps track of the top twenty most Goggled sites, updated in real time^[1].