Tabcast is designed to get streams of URLs into and out of your browser. The following is currently supported, on a per-tab basis:

• Send all a tab's URLs to a (Tabcast server) group.
• Passively follow URLs sent to a group by other Tabcast users.
• Actively share control of a group browsing session.
• Monitor the real-time URL history of a group.

Obvious initial uses involve shared browser sessions, for example during conference calls.

Although this initial set of possible actions is interesting and useful, the wider goal is to make it possible for others to easily implement their ideas around browser URL streams. You can run a Tabcast server locally and customize it to add your own functionality. Possible uses run from the very simple, such as a local server that simply saves URL visits to a file, to much richer possibilities around browsing, collaboration, discovery, research, and analysis.

For a more useful description and a guide to using Tabcast, visit http://tabcast.net

Below are some rough technical notes.

$ cd node
$ npm install
$ NODE_ENV=development node server.js

You'll at least need the xcode command-line tools for the npm install command above to run successfully. Once you've installed them, run

$ sudo xcode-select --switch /usr/bin

You'll need Redis running. If you use Homebrew you can install and start Redis via:

$ brew install redis
$ redis-server /usr/local/etc/redis.conf

On Linux apt-get install redis-server, and you'll need npm (from https://npmjs.org/).

The server and extension use version 0.9.11 of socket.io. The client-side extension Javascript comes from dist/socket.io.min.js in the socket.io-client repo at https://github.com/LearnBoost/socket.io-client

If you run you own Tabcast server, you will need to be compatible with this version of socket.io or the extension background page will not communicate properly with your server.

On older versions of Chrome/Chromium (e.g., 20) there is a bug in the handling of context menus that causes the extension's Broadcast sub-menu to be repeatedly populated until the browser runs out of memory and crashes. Later versions (e.g., 23) have the bug fixed.

If you're running on Ubuntu and have an old Chromium you can add a PPA to track a more recent stable version from https://launchpad.net/~a-v-shkop/+archive/chromium

$ sudo apt-add-repository ppa:a-v-shkop/chromium
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get upgrade