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

Pinterest		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.

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.

While I was at it, once one extends browser bookmarking with action and types, it comes natural to use bookmarking with classifications and actions as a great personal productivity and GTD tool.

So there came the idea for Licorize, we started developing it, and became a real thing in a few months.

There has been a lot of discussion about what to replace Delicious with, and Licorize is one of the choices. It has evolved considerably in the last 12 months, some notes on this follow.

Thank you to all users that have supported us up to now: more to come!

Technical hurdles

When we first went online and also in the following months we had to meet several technical hurdles. It was the first time we had to develop and maintain an online service that has millions of bookmarks, and also millions of images (web site thumbnails) to generate and serve: 4.250.000 bookmarks and thumbnails created up to today. For this we used service distribution and the Amazon services and APIs.

The progress in stability of an online service can be somehow measured by the rate of growth of its error log, which has been drastically decreasing. The error log growth will never reach 0, as this is in the nature of non trivial software and also because when Facebook, Twitter or any other source used for authentication / integration simply is not answering, there is little choice but raising an exception. And this happens, as shown above in the picture.

We wanted to make bookmarking easy, powerful and quick in several different media, without bending to the more and more bizarre native development requirements of the app store controllers. And we actually managed to do so, because as of today Licorize appears as a tool and plugin in Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Apple’s App Store, Android Market, Blackberries, OsX Widget, Mozilla Apps (beta), runs on iPad (in several formats), and all this using a unique code base in HTML and JavaScript. Its non trivial but sill possible to do real multi platform development. And we also wanted to “talk” to as many services as possible, letting you import streams into your work timeline from any RSS / Twitter .

And then we also wanted to open your Licorize collections for your own access with other tools like Flipboard (so all of its contents are available as RSS in various formats) and even to customize the collections when presenting them online, with “Licorize booklets”.

This set of features is oriented to a “power bookmarker”, someone for whom online bookmarking is a relevant part of her / his creative and constructive projects.

Riches of HTML5

What is HTML5? Enriching HTML with semantic tags is cool but not that useful for creating applications. The advantages of HTML5 are simply browser evolution, supporting more reliably CSS3, JavaScript operations, extending native browser support, in particular state, so that we could produce a pure web based app that is capable of working offline. This done, we could proceed with releasing a Licorize client; the urban legend of “write browser apps in HTML, then publish them anywhere” actually is sometimes true. A similar story for plugins, which too require some “wrapping” but these too are essentially developed in HTML5, and hence uniformly for all platforms.

A year of updates

Here are some of the major improvements we released this year:

iOS and Android apps with offline support

Customized booklets

Several localizations

Readability support

Specific support for images, videos and maps in web pages

Indexed search of all contents

Integrated Google and Facebook authentication

And much more: posting strips to WordPress (all news in this same blog).

What next?

We are putting together a plan for future features. We’ll be happy to get and discuss your feedback and ideas on the community here.

Latest update

- Greatly improved RSS results.

- Access your “read it later” public RSS from your iPad / mobile QR code.

- Added Czech translation (thanks to “Foton”).

- Some little bug fixes.

- Merging two accounts now takes the longest license from the two accounts.

- One time fee raised from 14.99$ to 19.99$.

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 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!

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.

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.

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.

A webcast where the new image and video selection and presentation features are presented.

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

Presentations from bookmarks

For this spectacular new feature, see this post: Turning bookmarks into presentations with Licorize 2.0.

Levels of importance

A simple but very useful feature is that strips can be assigned levels of importance, both in edit and in view – just click on the importance ! symbol. This orders strips in the priority view.

New Weekly Review

The weekly review has been streamlined and the two approaches clearly separated.

For those using GTD, the weekly review is a “pre-work” process with which you review all “in” items; some people misunderstand this for the process of reviewing your open to-do’s, which is a different matter. So we gave two separate entry points to the two approaches.

Bookmarking locations & maps

You can now bookmark locations and maps, both by adding bookmarks of type “place” by hand – and you can write location names and a map will auto scroll there, and also while bookmarking on a map service: Google Maps, Bing Maps, Yahoo Maps are currently supported.

Remind me later & Flipboard integration

This is just a simple trick, but very, very comfortable: there is an option on your profile to set all your remind-me-later available as a “public” URL – a bit hard to guess. This way you can go and read your any RSS reader

E.g. to have them in Flipboard, you add the RSS to your Google Reader and then subscribe the folder from Flipboard.

Note: this requires a “pro” account.

Request from users

- Show tags from other users on projects

- Search shows also future and done items

Little improvements

- You can customize the types used, simplifying the interface (from your settings)

- there is a new “draft” type

- Added a time bar for fast navigation in work week.

- There is a global search from Licorize site in all public strips.

Plus many, many little bug fixes. The mobile version has been updated with location handling and all new features.

Last but not least:

Licorize for intranets

For enterprises that would like to have Licorize as a service running in their intranet, now can have it.

Licorize web service is available as standalone application that your company can install in its intranet.

In this way your bookmarking data is kept “behind you Firewall”, and it can be made compatible with companies’ policies and integrated with other internal data sources, as all Licorize’s data will be saved in readable format in an internal MySQL database.

Being built entirely in Java, Licorize is compatible with most company’s IT systems. The intranet version is licensed for an unlimited number of users, and full sources are included: all details here:

http://licorize.com/applications/licorize/site/licorize-intranet.jsp

Getting Licorize Pro for your team

There are more and more features and tools available for pro users – you can get Licorize pro for 5 users for a year for only $210. You can buy with credit card online or with a bank transfer – write us at info@licorize.com.