Licorize' Blog

This update comes after three weeks of development and testing – we hope it was worth the wait.

In order to further speed up Licorize and provide a safer service, we moved part of our service to Amazon’s cloud – you should see a speeding up of the entire service.

Apart from technicalities, here are the major features added.

Create strips with e-mail and Twitter

E-mail: You can create strips of various types by sending e-mails to Licorize Also attachments are handled correctly. See this FAQ for all technical details.

Twitter: Licorize can import all your tweets in your timeline. But now you can also make it create strips more selectively: you can create strips in Licorize by both public tweets and direct messages. And now you can also subscribe to projects via Twitter, receiving direct messages whenever somebody else creates strips on projects you subscribed. See this FAQ for all technical details.

Both these improvements make it possible to add strips from mobile devices outside the browser.

The expanded timeline

You can now expand your timeline view to include all strips from all projects where you are taking part (whoever created such contents). You access this through actions:

This has a considerable impact on performance – we will improve it future updates.

Apture integration

If you go to settings –> Connections you can now enable Apture integration, so that for any text you select in Licorize you can get Apture’s rich information feedback. See Apture here.

Small improvements

Bookmarking pages

Now you can bookmark also images, PDF pages and audio / multimedia files. Update the bookmarklet in your bookmarks / favorites.

Subscribe projects via Twitter

You can now get notified via a Twitter DM about new strips on projects you subscribed.

Feedback on login /enroll

- better feedback on login /enroll /missing e-mail.

Turn off premium

You can turn off premium features from your profile any time.

Bugs fixed

- Booklets are much faster.
- Fixed a bug in the e-mail for sending your invitations to new users.
- Fixed a bug which made strips imported from external sources disappear in home page.

And DropBox?

For DropBox integration, development is completed, we are just waiting for the authorization from the DropBox developers.

This is a simple but practical trick, using which you can present your references as coherent booklet. Moreover in a coming update the booklet pages will become interactive, letting users comments, retweet and more. You will also have booklet statistics.

For example, this blog post has this booklet as the set of its references.

To use this you just need a Licorize account; see all details here.

This is the soundtrack and the script of a introductory video to Licorize that we are creating in these days.

Get the mp3 here.

Here is the script:

Today we’ll explore the life of this curious creature: the web worker. Its home is the entire web, this polluted ocean of information, a true wilderness.

An international team of expert naturalist has been studying this species; after an expedition working closely with the natives, they defined a typical day of this species.

A day

This species is incredibly efficient in finding new sources of information, and consume it quickly. Millions of nanoseconds of innatural selection has produced this extraordinary creature.

See how they wake up in the morning, checking immediately their Twitter stream. Then they get to work, while sending and receiving tweets and listening to podcasts. The older specimens still use email, and can still write paragraphs longer than 140 characters. They are anyway deemed to extinction. As other naturalists pointed out, a likely evolution is towards 26 character messages.

At work, they keep getting and sharing information. Links are exchanged, pages visited, new ideas come and go, and most of this simply gets lost.

Getting home, the stream of information continues: using their mobiles, short and long messages are exchanged, podcast are heard. Again a stream of new ideas and things to be done and explored, potentially – but we’ll see that the destiny of these memes is simply to get lost.

In the evening information consumption of the web worker continues. On the couch with the iPad and its main course, Flipboard. Here too, ideas come, links are explored, feedback is given.

This kind of mammal seems so taken with information ingestion, that they do not eat concrete food very often.

Ssh: now: look, they are falling asleep, recovering energy for another day of information madness.

Danger

The web worker has only one fear: internet connection outage, which leaves them stunned and confused. But as soon as any connection is available, they get back to their information consumption.

This species, while growing in numbers every day, is under threat. The danger of extinction does not come from the environment, but entirely from internal causes: it comes from psychic pressure. The amount of information coming in and unmanaged, the spectrum of different stimuli is too strong and uncontrolled: they begin losing their sense of self. Information consumption in large doses adds to psychic pressure.

Quoting a recent research from MIT: “By plotting the current trends, in just two years the amount of information will lead most of the web workers to extinction.”

A new plant

But recently a limited subset of individuals seems to be recovering. After detailed enquiries, the cause seems to be a change in diet, in particular intense consumption of a new plant, Licorize.

This plant species was born in Tuscany, but has been spreading quickly from California’s valleys, because of some foreign seeds grown by mistake. Let’s see a typical day of an individual from this privileged group.

A day with Licorize

The location from which most plant consumption is done is while browsing: instead of jumping frantically from one page to the next, and then to taking notes, changing and loosing focus all the time, these somewhat calmer specimens have a little tool integrated in the browser that allows them to write down the context of inspiration while not leaving the current work. Look what happens when they are on a page and click their magic tool: a temporary window opens above the page, where they can collect information.

Notice that specific information gets recorded here: instead of a list of uniform bookmarks, with no logic nor team, here they collect structured information directly from the source.

There are many other ways in which information gets collected, all seeded inside the typical behavior of the web worker: as she tweets, as she sends e-mail, as she browses from devices. Even when they take pictures, a compulsory repetitive activity of this species, both in male and female specimens, they can leave a trace in Licorize, effortlessly.

Requiring a minimal effort is very important, as this species is hyperactively searching for information, but terribly lazy when it comes time to organize it – just like 3-year old homo sapiens.

When the web worker gets back to its Licorize’ nest, she finds a complete linear timeline of the randomly and incoherently collected information. And there further psychic pressure from the information coming in can finally be discharged, transforming bookmarks in to-do’s, ideas, goals, and more.

The ritual of the weekly review is performed by many, and those that don’t do it are considered “sinners”: social contact is to be avoided.

In a field study a group of social anthropologists has found that small groups of web workers, usually at most of seven individuals (there are strong taboos in these tribes against larger groups) suddenly started sharing their information meal and distributing weight among them; it seems that is a casual discovery a bit like the first capuchin monkey washing fruit.

These groups, that web workers call “teams”, transform information in action very efficiently.

Inside a team there seems to be no hierarchy, which some researchers say is a far consequence of IT being created by flower people of the 60’s.

There are even occasional attempts of socialization with individuals of other species, using so-called “booklets”, where the collective work is presented a bit like in a performance art event.

The Licorize plant is spreading among web workers, but also in web workers applications: you can integrate it in web applications, RSS, blogs, and even in clients. Up to now no negative side-effects of Licorize consumption have been found.

Its not that easy to say – and as I’m writing the script for an overview video on Licorize, I collected some of the definitions that can be found online. We’ve got an amazing number of reviews – in one month!

Life Hacker

Licorize is like Getting Things Done for bookmarks. It’s a tool to make your bookmarks actionable, attempting to keep them from piling up and you on task.

http://lifehacker.com/5644249/licorize-turns-your-bookmarks-into-tasks-goals-and-other-actionable-items/

Smashing Magazine

A new bookmarking service which allows you to mark relevant content without losing focus

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/10/19/50-powerful-time-savers-for-designers

Web Worker Daily

Licorize can add context to bookmarks, to turn them into projects, ideas, notes and more that you can share with your team members.

http://gigaom.com/collaboration/licorize-makes-bookmarks-more-useful/

Suberapps

Licorize’s aim is to turn bookmarking into essentially a shareable to-do list.

http://www.suberapps.com/web-apps/licorize-finally-a-way-to-actually-do-something-with-all-those-bookmarks/

Minimal

A cloud-based, task-management bucket where you can throw links, tips, bookmarks, and the like — all of which are actionable.

http://mnmal.org/post/1166966558/licorize-a-cloud-based-bit-bucket

Techme2

A bookmark manager on steroids

http://www.techme2.eu/startups/pietro-polsinelli-licorize/

Mj.liminal

By bookmarking, task lists and projects get created and then can be shared with a team—like a smarter Posterous-as-project-tool kind of thing

http://mj.posterous.com/licorize-for-the-web-worker-tribe

Viral Bliss

an ideal tool to start sorting through your mountain of information and begin to focus on the important things

http://viralbliss.com/post/1172759422/licotize-organizes-your-bookmarks-and-other-business-inf

OneThingWell

A bookmark-centric todo manager

http://onethingwell.org/search/licorize

Roget.biz

un vrai organiseur local, un couteau suisse de l’organisation. En fait la partie bookmarque n’est qu’une petite partie des fonctionalités du site

 http://roget.biz/licorize-un-delicious-en-mieux-organisez-vous

Wild Apricot

Licorize.com is a web-based bookmarking tool with a difference. It effectively turns your notes and bookmarks into a project-based to-do list

http://www.wildapricot.com/blogs/newsblog/archive/2010/10/12/licorize-to-do-manager-for-bookmarks.aspx

TheltiUK

not just a simple social bookmarking application but an application that can allow, individuals, small or even large business’s to manage a project, work or even there social life

http://blog.theitiuk.net/2010/09/licorize-review-social-bookmarking.html?1

Kazam

Social Bookmarks plus Projektmanagement

http://kazam.de/blog/2010/10/21/webdienst-licorize-social-bookmarks-plus-projektmanagement/

Matteo Bicocchi

It’s an innovative experiences collector (now in beta) that lets you turn any web bookmark or status update from twitter® and facebook® into an active part of any shared project you and your team are working on.

http://pupunzi.open-lab.com/2010/09/09/bookmarking-is-over-just-licorize-it/

In this well written blog post: How to Use to Delicious: The King of Social Bookmarking the author Kristi Hines explores some new ways to use Delicious, articulated in 8 points. When I read the 8 points presented and their contents, I realized that on all of them Licorize has something more to offer. So here I go in detail for each of them:

#1: Organizing Your Resources: Well, here the problem with a flat bookmarking tool like Delicious is always the same: you loose a major part of the semantic context of your bookmarking. Bookmarks collections are an entry point to create new ideas, teams, projects: this is what Licorize empowers. For more details see Beyond Delicious.

#2: Action Plans: to support action plans in Delicious you have to resort to tag hacks, like creating a tag named “actionfacebookpage“. It is a fix for the fact that you lack behavior on bookmarks – some bookmarks are actually to-do items, and like should have a state, disappear when done etc. . And a collection of such bookmarks on a theme should be distributable between a group – and more, This is exactly what Licorize provides.

#3: Company Sharing: having multiple Delicious accounts is again a hack – we tried that too in the past. It is very uncomfortable, e.g. you will likely forget where you are logged and bookmark in the wrong account. And also a lot of information likely should be shared across the accounts, but it won’t be. Instead with Licorize just use a unique account and different teams, and there you can exchange messages, curate the collected information, and more.

#4: Backlink Recording, #5: Social Networking Profiles, #6: Social Mentions, #7: Writing Showcase. Of course Licorize generates flat lists of backlinks pointing to the original pages, but actually much more can be done. These four points concern how comfortable it is to keep track of online locations by bookmarking – but more tools for classification and behavior help preserve the original information. But where Licorize shows really more power w.r.t. Delicious is when you want to publish / share such contents.

Because if you want to share a collection as a workplace, a project, Licorize provides a set of classification and management tools that are simply completely absent from Delicious. And if you want to share bookmarks as a public collection, Licorize lets you publish them not just as a list,  but as an online “booklets”, see several examples here. Licorize presents public and rich contents online a bit like Flipboard presents Tweets as a “social magazine” instead of a flat list.

#8: Don’t Lose Your Bookmarks! Licorize not only lets you export your bookmarks as an HTML file, also exports in Excel your classified contents.

Concluding, what is done in Delicious by hand maintained tags whose coherence relies on the good memory of the user and the perfect “tag harmony” in the group of taggers, is done in a regulated and automated context in Licorize. Give it a try!

Read It Later

Read It Later © is a popular bookmarking tool available at http://readitlaterlist.com/ .

Licorize’s plugins / extensions / booklets all support a similar functionality, we called it “Remind me later”, which adds a bookmark to Licorize without requiring any intervention from the user.

Depending on personal habits, Licorize users may like to migrate from Read It Later to Licorize or keep using both applications (or just use Read It Later, but then you are wasting time here ). You can keep using both applications as Licorize will import daily all the bookmarks added in Read It Later. So then you can move the bookmarks to projects, share them with specific teams, transform them in to-do’s etc.

To enable the daily import, just go to Settings –> Connections, you’ll find the Read It Later logo there:

Just insert your Read It Later user name and enable the synch.

Read It Later® is a registered trademark of Idea Shower, LLC.

Instapaper

From Instapaper we don’t do a synch, we just import the bookmarks once. For doing the import, see this FAQ.

Instapaper is © 2010 Instapaper, LLC.

A contextual introduction: Publishing your bookmark collections as “magazines” on the web.

A usage FAQ: FAQ: Publishing your bookmark collections on the web

Licorize staff announces that starting today a Beautiful Booklet Pageant is open: every once in a while, we will assign a 1-year Premium Licorize license to a user that submitted to us her/his public booklet, and let us link it from our site – and we liked the booklet.

You can send booklet addresses to info@licorize.com.

To learn how to use booklets see this FAQ.

The picture on the left (comes from here) is just to confuse you a bit.

Its been a lot of hard work but now we’re out – indeed we shipped, dear Mr. Godin.

Special thanks to all the users of the community for the feedback received during  alpha and beta, to all the journalists and bloggers that wrote reviews, and to all users that tried beta.

And last but not least, I want to thank the more than 500 (and growing) silent users who immediately liked it, understood it, adopted it, and have been using it every day since. With amazingly high conversion rates of the web site and application trial, we must be doing something really, really right. More to come!

P.S. What is coming out really soon: Read It Later integration, DropBox integration, Excel export, more filters on booklets.