Turning bookmarks into presentations with Licorize 2.0
One of the many ways in which I use Licorize is as support for blogging: as a tool for collecting information while I’m preparing the blog, and also to structure things I want to do. But the information so collected can also be used to share sources – as information collected can easily made public as readable web pages – in Licorize called “booklets”. And now with Licorize 2.0 such lists of link, pictures and more can be easily arranged in the form of a presentation, like a set of slides online, whose content and layout can be customized in detail.
Therapeutic role of bookmarking
Any personal or team productivity software should answer this simple question:
Which is the human, too human flaw that you are dealing with?
In the case of Licorize, our bookmarking tool, we are also meeting the tendency of having too many ideas and projects running to keep them “under control”, which means also simply remembering what the idea was, where it came from, whether you already analyzed it or discussed it.
In relation to this, I can tell you a secret: most of the ideas you boomark and collect will remain just ideas. You’ll never actually do all that stuff. Still, having bookmarked / noted them will somehow put your mind at rest about it, and you can keep focusing on what among them more important. The fact that we have more ideas than to-do’s recorded in Licorize testifies just this.
It’s a bit like taking pictures. Most pictures (99.99%?) most of the time are never looked at, and nobody really wants to look at them. But for many taking a picture gives a little reassurance, that things are somehow preserved, kept. The real effect is the contrary – to help you just move on.
Licorize can be more effective with respect to basic bookmarking because already when bookmarking it allows you to give a definite type to your lingering thought, giving you even more reassurance that it is preserved forever and so you can stop thinking about it – and move on.
This is not the only advantage, because you’ll actually get to do some of the noted stuff – and there Licorize can be a help in many ways. Still, we are weak creatures – help should be welcome.
Delicious replacement for Firefox 4
Just a note to point out that Licorize Firefox plugin works perfectly with Firefox 4:
This includes the sidebar with search etc. .
As Licorize does a full import from Delicious, whose plugin seemingly does not work yet with Firefox 4, you could migrate now!
How many people use Licorize daily? And how?
We get between 20 to 50 new users per day, and in total we got now 11300 users, which since the 1st of October (2010) is 66 new users per day on average.
About 7% of these have become real users, which is a quite high conversion rate.
Licorize is not a tool that you necessarily use every day; still, we have “power users”, users that login every day, these are about 200. Users that use Licorize frequently (more than once a week) are now about 800.
Premium users: we have now about 100 premium users. As is common with new online services, the acquisition of premium users is a slow process, but it is getting speed all the time: we started having one Premium user in the first month, then we got one a week, and now are getting a new one almost every day. Our marketing target is to reach 1000 Premium users.
How Licorize is used
Users created 2.807.053 strips in less than six months (!!!!), in decreasing order, mainly bookmarks, status updates (these are imported), remind me later, ideas, to-dos, notes and read items.
Notice the disparity between “remind me later”, about 100.000 items, and “read” items, about 6.000, which shows how hard it is to keep up with intentions 
Analogously and surprisingly there are more ideas (about 30.000) than to-dos (25.000). Anyway. 30.000 ideas is a pretty impressive number – go creative people!
There are now 20.000 projects, which means that about 10.000 projects have been created on top of the default ones. That too is a quite impressive set.
So this is the current state as we are about to reach the sixth month of online presence. We’ll see what happens in the next six months – several improvements in Licorize will be released in the next months.
Licorize updated: “untagged” support and bug fixes
A minor Licorize update is online. Features:
- There is an additional filtering possibility, by “untagged”, which will give you all the strips that are not tagged at all. Of course this filter can be combined with all the others as usual.
- Weekly review can be retweeted.
Bugs fixed:
- Time zone is now supported correctly – this is a quite refined feature, the time zone of your browser will be detected so the same strip seen from London is set as created at 3 p.m., will be seen as created at 6 a.m. local time in Los Angeles.
Licorize update: user guide, search sidebar, time zone support…
Licorize has been updated with several new features:
User guide
A complete Licorize user guide is now available, as PDF and online as HTML:
We are also recording instructional webcasts.
New search sidebar for Firefox plugin
The new Licorize Firefox plugin now includes the much requested sidebar, with all recent strips, filters and searches.
The sidebar is also coming for Chrome.
Better work logging: time zone support
Licorize now supports correctly displaying dates and time in function of the time zone of the user.
We have also fixed some small bugs in the work week view.
Localizations
Licorize comes with a complete Polish translation; we thank Adam Mazurkiewicz for providing it.
French translation is almost finished (a partial version is online), and the Russian and German ones have just started.
So the available set of user interface languages will be English, Spanish, French, German, Russian, Polish and Italian You can always volunteer for providing your own language, Premium licenses in exchange!
Various
- There is a new print function, accessible from Actions.
- We improved the export to Excel function.
- Now in strip edit you can directly set a strip as “important”.
Near future
What we are developing now is the booklet customization features and lighter versions of the public booklets and pages.
Birth of Licorize’ Tower of Babel
The first localizations of Licorize’ interface have been published: Spanish and Italian. This means that every user can set the interface to a preferred language among the ones available which are now English / American (they differ for date formats), Spanish and Italian. Suggestions for translation improvements are welcome.
French, Russian and Polish are in the making. Please we need a German volunteer for translating! Non-expiring Premium license as prize and, most importantly, eternal gratitude from the Licorize team
In order to set a language, simply go to settings –> Account –> Select language and then save.
Licorize updated: “read” function, promo on non-expiring licenses…
A “readable” version of a blog post of this blog.
We did a maintenance upgrade of Licorize database increasing performance and setting more reliable backups on Amazon cloud. We also did an update and expansion of the application features.
Non-expiring Premium license promotion – get yours before the 15th of February
Until the 15th of February you can buy a non-expiring Licorize Premium license at 79$ (USD), instead of 149$. Get it here. This way you will purchase it only once and enjoy premium forever. Yes we know how complex company purchases procedures can be, so this should help.
(If you have just bought a yearly license and would like to get the non-expiring one, you just have to pay the difference – write us at info@licorize.com and we’ll send you instructions.)
Read It and Store function
By updating your browser plugin / extension / bookmarklet you get a new action: “Read it and Store”. This additional bookmarking functionality is a real killer! What this means is that with one click (or keyboard shortcut) the current page will be made readable and it will also be saved as a “Remind me later” entry in Licorize. The bookmarklet works also from the iPad.
If you use Firefox: The new plugin with the additional entry is not approved yet. On Firefox you can get an extended version of the plugin before the official Mozilla approved version by downloading and installing the plugin here:
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/downloads/file/109639/licorize-1.3.6-fx.xpi
If you use Chrome: the extension will be updated automatically.
For all other browsers, this additional feature requires adding a bookmark (a so called “bookmarklet”) – instructions follow.
If you use the bookmarklet: Get the bookmarklet by going to tools –> Bookmarklet and plugins i.e. here.
For the iPad: Instruction for this and all the other bookmarklets can be found here: http://licorize.com/ipad.jsp
Small features and bug fixes
- In case of more than 300 tags, the strikethrough was active on all low used tags.
- When filtering by to-do or goal the show all etc. filter did not work.
- Sped up deleting tags in tag manager.
- Expanded the Hotlist page with most active users.
The life of this curious creature: the web worker
We just released a mockumentary concerning the life of the web worker and how the quality of her / his lifestyle can be improved with Licorize. See the video on YouTube in HD here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4g0QHLZFdwE&hd=1
The illustration and animation is mainly by Pino Panzarella and the voice over by Pietro Polsinelli.
In the video we have quick screenshots of the following sites that we love:
- Pupunzi jQury components: http://pupunzi.com
- Objectified: http://www.objectifiedfilm.com/
- Coding Horror: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/
- A Life Well Wasted: http://alifewellwasted.com/
- iA Writer: http://www.informationarchitects.jp/en/writer-for-ipad/
- Seth Godin: http://www.sethgodin.com/sg/
In the video we also refer to this brilliant idea: Flutter.
There is no connection whatsoever between Licorize and the linked sites.
Licorize update: Post to WordPress and more
This release contains extended updates and new features.
People filter
In this update you will have noticed a new “People” box on the right, which makes people you are working with more visible, makes it easier to share work and makes it possible to “filter by someone”.
This means that if you want to see all the activity of someone on all the projects you are sharing you just have to click on their gravatars.
Upgrading to Premium: new 5-user pack
You can now buy 5 user Premium license packs for a year at 3.5$ (USD) per user per month. This is an ideal solution for small groups in companies. You can also buy multiple 5-user packs for larger groups. See these detailed FAQs concerning Premium licenses:
http://community.licorize.com/tags/premium/
Post to WordPress
Now with Licorize you can select a set of strips to be published as a blog post draft on WordPress. See this FAQ for all details.
This feature is enabled only for Premium accounts.
Links to readable version of pages
On all links from bookmarks, remind me later and booklets there is a new button which links to a “readable” version of the web page corresponding to the bookmark. This will not work 100% of the time, but works most of the time for articles.
This feature is enabled only for Premium accounts.
Android (and iOS) bookmarklet
We have created instructions for bookmarking pages in Licorize from Android browsers. Navigate to this URL with your Android device and follow instructions:
http://licorize.com/android.jsp
While we were at it we also improved it for iOS (iPhone, iPod, iPad), go here:
Sorting strips
We have simplified and made more visible the sorting options. Whenever you enable ordering by priority, strips marked as important will be on top.
Instapaper integration
Integration with Instapaper was actually always active through RSS, but we added a specific entry in settings –> Connections to facilitate integration.
Booklet pageant
The booklets have been updated, simplifying navigation, adding functionality and fixing a high number of bugs (ah, the infinite richness of HTML…).
Contextually to the update of the booklets we are happy to announce the first winner of the Booklet Pageant,
DJ Quietstorm,
with these three beautiful booklets:
http://licorize.com/projects/djquietstorm/Ya-Feelin–That-?desc
http://licorize.com/projects/djquietstorm/Good-Lookin-?
http://licorize.com/projects/djquietstorm/Design-Designer?desc
Finale and near future
In the works we have:
- a new version of the Firefox plugin with a new search toolbar and loads of new functionality
- facilities for bookmarking and embedding videos
- customizations of booklets
- localized version in Italian, Spanish and French. We will reward with a non-expiring Premium license those who contribute a complete translation either in German, Russian, Portuguese, Polish, Chinese or Swedish (you can volunteer for any language) – all details and the Excel file with the labels in a coming blog post – if you want to volunteer already write us at info@licorize.com.
Thank you all so much for the amazing and continuous press reviews and loads of love coming from Twitter streams.
