Social bookmarking from Pinterest to Licorize
The increasing relevance of getting information from web for everyday work and life is making online bookmarking a space for increasingly specialized web applications. Once there was only Delicious, which was used both as a “social bookmarking” tool for spotting and sharing trends and also as a tool for personal classification of useful information. This ambiguity in aim made people migrating from Delicious go to very different apps.
In this space of “online bookmarking tools” Licorize and Pinterest sit at the opposite ends of the spectrum.
This is Pinterest:
Stream of images with comments from the web.
And here Licorize:
To-do’s, ideas, projects from the web.
In Open Lab, where we develop Licorize, there are several of us that use both.
Pinterest & Licorize – different worlds
| Licorize | |||
 |
In short: Share images you love. |  |
In short: Get things done on the web. |
 |
Basic user need is “showing to the world the beautiful images I found” |  |
Basic user need is “get a lot of information organized with no hassle”. |
 |
Stuff bookmarked is meant to be shared to all. |  |
Stuff bookmarked is meant to be shared to people working together on something. |
 |
Everything is… an image bookmark. |  |
Nothing is just a bookmark. |
 |
Most common themes are pets, weddings, furniture, food. |  |
Most common themes are projects, ideas, work, marketing. |
 |
Is mostly used at home. |  |
Is mostly used at work. |
P.S. As Licorize developers, we tried to bring the deep usability of the latest generation of social web apps in the traditionally hostile world of to-do manager, without over-simplifying the subject matter.
Like this:
One year developing this new thing called Licorize
A new thing from old things
I had the idea for Licorize while trying to use social bookmarking for tracking my marketing research and ideas while browsing. I tried using Delicious for that, inspired by this Peldi’s post, and it simply didn’t work for me, because I needed to do more. Using tags for both classification (“review”) and types (“to-do”) and sharing with others (“Silvia”) and relevance (“important”) ended up in a mess, also because the old style always-reload-everything Delicious web interface made . Tags are great for… tagging, which means connecting disparate information which belongs to different contexts. But for other uses, we should require specific behavior: a to-do should support a one-click action to make it disappear immediately when done, sharing some and not all bookmarks with others requires a set of features that are alien to tagging, and so on.
Licorize iOS app released
We just released the Licorize iOS app that is a free iOS app that synchronizes with your online account and allows you to read, create and edit all your strips. You can work on your app also when offline, everything will get synched as soon as you go online. Yes you can use the QR code above to get the app with your iPhone.
Technical feat: all in HTML5
All these has been done by creating a unique HTML5 application for all devices and also for browser based access. So the same core set of functionality is in a platform specific wrapper, and every maintenance /evolution of the code will benefit all users.
So the Android “native” app too is actually the same app, and also the mobile version which you can use through the browser. Yes you can use the QR code below to get the app with your Android phone.
Licorize now with indexed search
Licorize always had a full-text search, but latest update does stemming of the contents and supports search operators.
This means that you can now search with AND’s, OR’s, and searching “running” you will find strips with “run”. Thank you Lucene.
In latest update we also simplified settings, and published an update to the mobile online version which is a step towards the stand-alone client, due soon.
Hope this helps!
Integrated Google, Twitter, Facebook authentication and more
Latest update introduced the possibility of enrolling and authenticating using external services: Twitter, Facebook, Google.
And also:
- We introduced a search-in-features as a help – a bit like OSX’s spotlight.
- We fixed a bug concerning encoding of titles of pages that are not in UTF-8.
- Setting priority on a strip can now be done without going into edit.
- Booklets can have a specific presentation text.
- Imports from external sources can now be set on specific projects.
Note: in order to benefit mostly from this update if you are using a browser bookmarklet (not a browser plugin) you should remove and regenerate the bookmarklet from Licorize.
Licorize pricing policy change
We have decided to change Licorize pricing in order to fit it better to its users and usage. Licorize was initially targeted to team usage, but we have found that it is actually mostly used by individuals in semi-isolation. So from now on there is no distinction between free and “pro” or “premium” Licorize: we ask all new users to contribute once – and once only – with a minimal fee: 14.99$, and give full features to all. New users have seven days of free usage to try the application before we ask for the one time fee.
From a different perspective, the price of an unlimited Pro license has gone from 149$ to 14.99$ – exactly one tenth!
Users who bought Licorize non-expiring at the old price can write us at info@licorize.com and we’ll send them 10 more licenses that they can give to colleagues and friends. Thanks for your early support and sorry for any inconvenience.
Updated Licorize one minute intro
Some little updates to Licorize’ one minute intro.
Here is the transcript:
You know I was doing some marketing research, and I wanted to collect and share these bookmarks – I used usual bookmarking tools, but then it was easy to bookmark the pages but then working and sharing specific bookmarks was quite cumbersome.
Often bookmarks are part of a more general idea, of a project, that is made not only of bookmarks – also of ideas, to-dos, notes, images and videos…
While it is easy to bookmark, it is not easy to share the context where the bookmark makes sense.
One could say that No bookmark is an island. I also understood that in a sense we “bookmark” all the time – tweeting, taking pictures from a mobile, even writing blog posts. Often parts of pages are what we are interested in: videos, images, some text.
Research and selection of public information is part of the working life of many – it’s not just bookmarking, it’s also working.
These considerations are the starting point of a bookmarking service that supports collecting information, refining it, sharing and presenting it – and also turning it into work activities of different kinds. It is a new and very practical way to get work done.
Webcast: Images and videos with Licorize
A webcast where the new image and video selection and presentation features are presented.
Webcast: Improving your online marketing by bookmarking
A short webinar on how to use bookmarking for improving online marketing campaigns, here. We see how Licorize as a marketing tool can be used to handle the different phases of online marketing campaigns.
The simple PowerPoint I used as guideline, from Slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/ppolsinelli/improving-your-online-marketing-with-bookmarking
Licorize 2.0: bookmark presentations, RSS/Flipboard integration, maps & location handling and more
In this major update includes improvements in almost every aspect of Licorize and some brand new functionality. All details follow.
Presentations from bookmarks
For this spectacular new feature, see this post: Turning bookmarks into presentations with Licorize 2.0.
