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Dynamic Paywall Icon

Will the blogosphere  soon need a dynamic paywall icon that appears automatically next to any URL to tell the browser that he can access the story because he is a subscriber or not?  Perhaps even indicating how many views are left from his “free quota”.

For example, if you use Seesmic to view Twitter feeds it already decodes the short URL and shows you the real destination in a bubble popup (and thumbs of images at Twitpic or active Google Maps from geotags) so the technology looks very doable.  I’m surprised this bubble is not yet used for ads (opt in or not).

Maybe users might even pay for such a time-saving and irritation reducing feature:-)

2 Responses to “Dynamic Paywall Icon”

1. Mary Branscombe Says:
   February 25th, 2010 at 9:35 am

   my friend Seth Waggoner’s Interclue plugin (only for Firefox currently, I think) is designed to do that sort of thing…

2. Tim Coldwell Says:
   March 12th, 2010 at 10:46 am

   Can’t be too difficult if Google can do this: http://googlemobile.blogspot.com/2010/03/in-stock-nearby-look-for-blue-dots.html