Licorize' Blog

Information transformation is the start of management: this is one way of summarizing the content of Getting Things Done (GTD). The to-do’s not “noted down”, the ideas remained vague that keep haunting your mind: you can get rid of all this by “externalizing” these thoughts, creating your unified list. The popularity of GTD comes also from this elementary consideration.

What tools to use to create your lists? There are many; but for the web worker today the personal world of ideas is often enriched by sets of links to diverse web applications and sites, and these link again make sense in a semantic context. And for this notes on paper or classical simple text files are not an adequate support. Things get worse when you want to share and present such ideas.

Licorize tries to be an answer to this need: you can quickly put together lists of “ideas” (links, images, texts), and classify them in projects, types, tags, without leaving your web page and loosing focus. The GTD process of “transformation into actionable items” is then entirely natural.

Bookmarks get transformed in to-do’s that get collected in distinct projects for distinct teams. Tagging, searching, and then presenting the result as an “online magazine”: all this is possible in Licorize. The ambiguity between your timeline, the set of your bookmarks and ideas as taken in time and their presence as sorted lists in projects is turned into a strength of the user interface, letting you quickly switch from one to the other.

A useful and popular functionality used by web workers are the “read it later” like browser extensions. Two popular examples are Read it later and Instapaper. The practical side of these extension is that you can bookmark a page to be read later without further interrupting your current focus.

The limit of such services is again that bookmarks are taken out of any context. In Licorize instead you can quickly and easily move the collected bookmarks to a project, and eventually turn them to to-dos or ideas. You’ll get that your team will see them, they will appear in your weekly review, and so on.

So Licorize has its own “Remind me later” button, which adds your bookmark to Licorize without any further question. The tag sent is configurable, just go to your browser add-on list.

Or How To Licorize Your Delicious usage

In this Delicious review (in French; you can read it more comfortably using Readability), Thierry Roget presents some advanced way to use Delicious and connected services, structured in 20 points. A Thierry is also an alpha tester of Licorize, and we boast that Licorize can “replace” Delicious, it is the place and moment to give more detailed information.

The first points (1-5), concerning watching popular tags, is an activity which can be interesting for “trend watchers”, but is not of general interest. Licorize aims at turning the occasional and multi-sourced bookmarking into specific projects for specific teams, and so in this sense it is simply different – this is not a feature that can be supported in the same sense.

For subscribing to news (6-10) – say new strips on teams, this is already possible in Licorize via e-mail, and it will be possible to subscribe to the RSS of team’s public pages. You will be able to send messages through teams to members of your network and also to members of theirs.

Once you will have public projects in Licorize, you will be able to share and subscribe to them (13-16). And this will be much more than a brutally simple list of links: links make little sense out of context, and their tagging too. There is more semantic content in bookmarking than what can be rendered by a “flat” tagging, but this is completely lost in Delicious – not so in Licorize.

For points (17-20), I don’t find having a “tagometer” a really useful function… anyway not only in release 1.0 you will have public projects, but also public profiles. So calling
http://licorize.com/public/yourUserName
(or something of the sort) you will see the list of all public bookmarks (and ideas, to-do’s, goals…) taken by myself, but again not presented as a simple list, but paged as an online magazine.

About Twitter, Facebook, Evernote, Flipboard and going beyond simple bookmarking.

Licorize alpha as is currently on line has many essential features to make it a candidate successor to Delicious: handles smoothly web site bookmarking and integrates this in the work and to-do management process. But in order to make a complete tool for today’s web worker, something is missing.

During last month I did a lot of research on the themes and problems related to Licorize, in particular, GTD implementations, presenting lists of to-do’s and bookmarks as a public presentation (a bit like Flipboard does for Twitter), and on how to reduce the effort to get in Licorize a complete timeline.

1. Integrating the timeline

If part of my working and researching life is on the web, it is likely that I will be already using the most common tools and creating public contents, non only with Delicious, but also with Twitter and/or Facebook, taking notes with Evernote, and more. Why do I have to do an effort to keep them together, consistent in synch? It is something the Licorize should do for me.

So the first idea for extension came from considering “status updates” as “strips”: anything in Licorize is a “strip”, a bookmark, an idea, a note, a to-do. Status updates, similarly to existing strips, have a rich content (links, images, notes to other users) and can be connected to an open project, to a team, work can be registered on them, can be part or included in a presentation. So why not have your status updates (from Twitter, Facebook or any other common source) in your Licorize timeline view?

 Licorize lets you move quite smoothly from a timeline view to a “sorted list” one and back. So it came naturally to open the possibility of including in the timeline status updates, so to get to a complete one, and rich content from more sources. We have already your bookmarks, your tweets, your ideas, your notes, your to-do’s… what is a rich source of multimedia contents that is in wide use? Well, it’s Evernote! Evernote wonderfully manages photos, also text-rich ones, and much more, audio, etc., so that too could be something that will fill up the timeline.

All this additional material integrates wonderfully in Licorize because it can become part of a team, work can be recorded, it can be part of a brain storming, and so on.

2. Public projects and profiles as booklets

The second idea came from thinking about how to present online a “public project”, so that anyone external to the team can see in real time the collection of bookmarks, ideas, notes, to-do’s etc. collected by the team.

Using Flipboard gave a great inspiration, and that is our starting point: it will be presented a bit like a magazine, we will call it “booklet view”.

Having a complete chronology makes the “strip list” (i.e. all Licorize contents) a perfect base for a Flipboard like interactive view, with social actions of a different kind.

You will access each of your “team at work” on a public URL, and navigate through notes and bookmarks in a paged, illustrated view, this view we’ll call a web-based booklet.

First studies are in the picture.

3. Social Licorize

The third idea came from seeing the network of people with which you are working with in Licorize (and then recursively those they are working with…) as a network of people that needs a better support from Licorize to connect and to have discussions.

A weakness of the current version of Licorize lies in the “invite user in team” process which has been found as confusing at time. It is a crucial functionality for moving from personal to team bookmarking and sharing, so we have remodeled it for version 1.0.

Given the availability of public projects and public user profiles (with a corresponding RSS), “social” actions can be enabled from the online booklets: retweeting, commenting, joining the project, and so on. Moreover the network of teams will be viewable.

Version 1.0

After a couple of internal meeting we have fixed the roadmap from Licorize alpha, its current stage, to the beta version which should be functionally complete, including the three points above.

Free and pro Licorize versions

Licorize will be free for personal usage, if you use it simply as a replacement for Delicious that can also support personal to-do management. The pro version will add the possibility of interacting with other users, and will have a monthly cost – to be determined.

A final note to the alpha testers: thank you so much, you will all be rewarded with a free, non-expiring, pro account! All users enrolled and active before the 1st of October, 2010, will get such non expiring free license.

Love to hear your feedback on the community web site.

For taking and sharing bookmarks there is Delicious, which is – was – great. Delicious is a social bookmarking web service which was born in 2003, and then was bought by Yahoo. See this blog post Tracking your Company’s Mentions with Del.icio.us for an example of “power usage”.

But maybe today we can do more than what Delicious provides. There are not only web site bookmarks that we want to track: Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin are significant parts of the web. You may want to track status updates and also the pictures you can take in Evernote, for example. Bringing all these sources together in a project should be simple.

Why your Delicious bookmarks end up being an unreadable mess?

I’ve been looking at friends’ Delicious accounts, and asking how they’ve been using them. An answer I got frequently is this:

When I started using it it was great. But as I kept bookmarking, I never did maintenance, and old links that have become irrelevant are always there and I could no longer see what was relevant and what not. It ended being an unreadable cloud and so I stopped using it.

In Licorize too you preserve all bookmarks, but maintenance comes naturally from the fact that you distribute bookmarks into “teams at work” i.e. projects, ideas, presentations – and also because the user interface is more reactive and allows more “in place” actions. Delicious basic approach is flat – which is great at the beginning, but in time is not enough in many cases.

A note for Licorize alpha version: a great feature that Delicious has and Licorize currently doesn’t is sharing bookmarks at an URL – we’re building that and there too we are trying to do something better than a plain list. It will be something similar to what Flipboard does to Tweet lists.

Licorize import

As Licorize is immodestly though of as a replacement and expansion of Delicious, in it even in this alpha stage there is a owerful import function from Delicious to Licorize. You find it by logging in Licorize site, click on "settings", select the “Import bookmarks” tab and then click on “Import Delicious …”.

Before importing, you will need to export your bookmarks from Delicious, by going to http://www.delicious.com, log in, click on top on “settings”, click on “Export / Backup Bookmarks” , and then probably you should export those filtered by a few tags (see below).

Open the obtained .htm file in a browser, select all the contents – the links (not the HTML source) and paste it in Licorize text field. At the end of the import, you will also have a nice thumbnail of all imported sites.

Import wisely

A friend sent me as a test all his Delicious bookmarks to be imported in Licorize. It was 6300 bookmarks, and this is the result:

That loooong white strip on the right is the set of all tags for the 6300 bookmarks. Tags are meant as a way to organize and keep bookmarks in order, as a way to group bookmarks. When you end up having as many tags as bookmarks, or even more, tags become noise instead of information, and hence useless if not a bother. And if you use Delicious a lot, as we used to, you likely end up in such situation – because the tools for managing tags are not that practical, and bookmarks never get redistributed to.. projects, work, ideas. Collecting bookmarks and distributing and sharing them is exactly what Licorize provides.

Import from Delicious is a non reversible process: if you have imported 1000 bookmarks, you can’t delete them all in one operation. So the best way to proceed in importing from Delicious is to export bookmarks selectively, selecting the tags which are more important, and then using Licorize tag organizer and teams to put thing in order.