in Agglom there is a new feature you may be interested in: you can embed and display any public set (link, thumbnails, images, videos, etc…) in your blog, website or wherever you want.

On the right column of every set’s multimedia page you may notice now a “Embed set” widget that allows you to cut and paste the code in the HTML markup of your blog post / website to display the full page dynamically generated. In the widget, you can also see a preview of the rendering just clicking on the “preview and info” link.

You have full control on the style of the embed multimedia page. If you don’t like ours, you can customize and overwrite it using your own CSS (remember to use the “!important” keyword in your own attributes).

Here is an example of how “Latte Art best photos, videos and resources” set would look like: http://www.agglom.com/embedCode.aspx?id=45425.

in the latest months we have been enjoying working hard towards a new release that brings Agglom to a new social network level: Agglom Beta 4 – the next generation of social bookmarking.

This new version has been just deployed and, as you can see on www.agglom.com, there is a bunch of new free services that you can enjoy.

The biggest feature of the new release is the Groups one. Every user can create public or private groups that anybody else can join to share general or niche interests. You can decide the privacy and permissions options for your group.

Group members can share and aggregate sets of links, start and reply to discussions and subscribe to real-time, daily, or weekly updates. And if your groups become over-used, then you need moderation! So why wouldn’t you give “moderation” privileges to some of the members?

Responding to huge user demand, we are glad to release the bookmarklet. The bookmarklet is a “special link” that you can bookmark or drag ‘n drop into your Favorites / Bookmarks bar that, when clicked, will let you quickly and easily add the web page you are displaying to a new or previously saved set on Agglom.

Do you like sets of a fellow agglom member? You can subscribe to every user’s updates to receive email notifications every time they create a new set.

Did you get a look at your public profile? A bigger avatar and a whole new tabbed area display all the information to somebody that may be interested in your Agglom account: your publicly shared sets, your contacts, your subscriptions and your favorites.

But it’s not just the “public” areas that we care about. We’ve created a new My Agglom page where you can quickly and easily browse through all your contents and settings, including private messages.

These and dozens of other features and improvements have just been released, so, why don’t you check them out? And yes, we have also introduced a non-intrusive advertising system. With this, the website is now ensured to be economically auto-sustainable (and is a big gain we all are proud of) and you can be sure that we will never leave you alone

As always, we highly value our users’ feedback: on GetSatisfaction you can share your considerations with us and also ask for any kind of support.

That is all, for now! Have a nice day

Enrico Foschi
Founder and Program Manager

Weird thing is that, the more we deploy new features, the more our task list becomes bigger and bigger – new ideas come out everyday and we are proud to say that we are still at the beginning.

Now, let’s talk about what is new in this release (Beta 3.4). Some of the features have been tested in the latest 2 weeks and other ones have just been deployed few hours ago:

• Organized news: few crazy spiders are currently crawling hundreds of RSS feeds from the most popular online news magazine to build up automatically sets of links for every popular news. Every set of links is supposed to contain different perspectives and not links to same articles / sources. Every spider has a Twitter profile that you can follow. The spiders are:
  • worldNews (Twitter: bestWorldNews): organized world news
  • sportNews (Twitter: bestSportNews): organized sport news
  • techNews (Twitter: bestTechNews): organized sci-tech news
  • businessNews (Twitter: bestMoneyNews): organized business news
  • entertainmentNews (Twitter: bestGossipNews): organized entertainment & gossip news
  • healthNews (Twitter: bestHealthNews): organized health news
• Coffee Break area (link): fancy a coffee break? Come here and get up to date with the latest and most popular web, world, sport, business, tech, health news
  

  Coffee Break

• Improved user’s public profile:
  

  User

• For every link to a Wikipedia page, the first paragraphs will be automatically retrieved and shown in the multimedia page:
  

  Wikipedia first paragraphs

• Every website with a specified description (in the meta tags) will be displayed with a “?” icon that will show it when the pointer will roll over it:
  

  Website descriptions

• In the set of links modify page the first line of the description will be shown for each element (expandible)
• Improved Firefox Extension (Agglomerator) RSS Feed imports landing page:
  

  Landing Page

• Amazon S3 integration: all the thumbnails and the images are now stored on Amazon S3 servers, with big improvements of performance, reliability and scalability.

Enjoy it

Enrico Foschi
Agglom.com Program Manager

Most of the users use Agglom for more than twice a month and a quarter of them use our free services on a weekly or daily basis.

With the latest release, the Beta 3.2, we deployed further improvements and new features to Agglom that will empower our users experience.

These ones are::

• General performance improvements on the “organize a set of links” page.
• Agglomerator enhancements: now Firefox users can use Agglomerator not only to save in set of links all or some of their currently opened pages, but also to update the ones they previously saved.
• CoolIris (formerly PicLens) full support for image links and website thumbnails. PicLens users can now browse them in a 3D gallery.

As usual, we invite all of you to give us your feedback, your comments and to share your ideas on our GetSatisfaction – customer service account: http://getsatisfaction.com/agglom.

Hope you enjoy our services

Enrico Foschi

Some new features:

• Suggest a link: anyone can suggest new links on any organized web session. Every new suggested link goes into an approval queue and the owner may decide to integrate it or to delete it. By default, the owner receives an email notification every time a user suggests a new link on one of her/his saved Web searchers. This notification service can be turned off in the privacy options.
  

  Suggest a link feature

• Web slideshows: for every organized web session, Agglom automatically creates a slideshow consisting of the pages stored in the session. Slideshows have a URL of their own: One example is http://www.agglom.com/webslideshow/49/Firefox_3. Slideshow URLs are listed at the top of each session’s page.
  

  Web Slideshow sample

• User RSS feeds: every Agglom user profile page now has a public RSS feed that lists the sessions stored for that user. Here is one example: http://www.agglom.com/userFeeds/vctr
  
  

  User's RSS feed

• Quick Add-A-Link feature: the owner can just jump to the bottom of an organized web session to add a new link, without browsing the “modify Web search” page

… some minor improvements:

• Select All / Deselect All links in the Agglomerator landing-page to select / deselect all the links

…and some fixes on the Firefox extension, on user avatars, on the comments feature and on other minor parts.

We would like to thank Marjoilein Hoekstra (http://cleverclogs.org/), one of our users who played a very important role in this release. Marjolein brain-stormed with us on how to improve Agglom. In fact, the web slideshow feature sprouted from her mind, as well as user RSS feeds and most of the other new features and improvements in this release. Thanks!

This is our strategy. We came out a little more than 1 month ago with the first version, with almost all the functionalities but a very raw design.

Why didn’t we wait to get a better design for the first beta (1.0)?

Because we really looked forward to the feedback of the web users not only about the design, but mostly about the core services, the features, the technologies, …

So, we were ready for the first launch, we fired and now we are continuing to aim

The first time we aimed was when we launched the Beta 2.0, with a richer design and more features (major ones were “contact list”, “privacy options for saved Web searches”, FireFox extension “Agglomerator”).

Now we are really happy to announce the new Beta 3.0.

The major new changes / features are:

• Improved UI design and usability (see screenshot)
• New alghoritms for organizing automatically content by type based on link
• Support for automatical recognition of videos (Youtube, Google Video, Metacafe, Vimeo, CollegeHumor, …), presentations (Slideshare, authorSTREAM, MyPlick), audios, files, images, …
• PicLens support
• Automatically created Slidshow for inserted image galleries
• Better UI for organizing Web search results
• Better UI for browsing Web search results
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) improvements

Screenshot

Screenshot of the new Agglom Beta 3.0 Home Page

As usual, any feedback / comment would be really appreciated

Agglom.com  – www.agglom.com

Enrico Foschi

• Improved “View organized content” UI
• Added 2 youtube video tutorial: how to organize contents and how to use Agglomerator
• Improved Images & Video positioning
• Users are able to open all the links together on group that contains more than 1 links
• Added sitemap.xml files
• Users can associate an optional description to every type of organizable content
• Fixed a minor issue with Agglomerator (the Firefox Addon): when the user was forcing some content to be identified as something it was not (ie: identifying a non youtube video link as a youtube video link), the element was inserted as the “forced type” and eventually not displayed
• Users that checked “I don’t want to be contacted by anonymous users” won’t be contacted for change proposals on organized contents
• SEO friendly urls
• Fixed a minor issue related to grouping elements
• Fixed a minor issue related to special characters in tags
• (other minor fixes and improvements)

Some of our UI testers told us that could be pleasant to have such short video tutorials in order to show clearly and quickly hot to use powerfully most of the offered features. Well, here we go

How to save and share your Firefox searches and tabs

This video explain how to use the Firefox Addon to save and share easily and quickly your firefox tabs:

How to organize, save and share web contents / web searches

This video explain how to use the Firefox Addon to save and share easily and quickly your firefox tabs:

History
After many hours of work, many organic crispy chips and Guaranito bottles, we release the Beta 1 version. It had a kind of raw design: the main purpose was to test the general usabiliy of the site and to see it “working with real users”. Users could basically:

• Manage their account
• Insert and manage contents
• Communicate with private messages

This is a screenshot of the Beta 1:

After some improvements, we released the final design and new major features like:

• Contact list (every user may decide to mark other users as friends, closest friends and/or family members)
• Private contents: every organized content may be shared with everybody, with some of your contacts or can even be protected by a password
• Improved home-page: top and latest users area
• Firefox extension Agglomerator: to save and share Firefox tabs in just one click
• Improved public and private profile pages
• Avatars: every user can upload a gif/png/jpeg avatar
• Notification system on new comments and new private messages (can be disabled in the settings)
• …other minor features…

This is a screenshot of the Beta 2:

Hope you’ll enjoy it :

www.agglom.com

Here we are, with the first Beta 1 release of Agglom (www.agglom.com) and the Agglom Official Blog, born to create a connection between our staff (technical and not) and our users.

Agglom is the place where everybody can create organized content connecting any type of content from the web. The connected contents can be viewed by the users in just one page.

Our aim is to decrease time and energies spent by the users in searching contents all over the web offering them a way to save, organize and share these ones.

This service is bringing the web contents to a new perspective: nowadays we have a huge (almost infinite) archive of free information available in millions of web sites in different types of formats (texts, videos, photos, etc…).

Agglom aims to organize these contents. This may even sounds like a “Web 3.0″ mission but, actually, it gives to the users even the chance to save and, most of all, organize their web searches (can be videos, photos, links, anything….): in this indeed is actually a Web 2.0 website.

Many releases and many features are coming in the next weeks.

We’ll keep you updated in this blog. Any comments would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Enrico Foschi