Beta 3.4 on live, with spiders, coffee breaks and Amazon S3

The latest two weeks have been really fun. We enjoyed testing new services integration, new improvements and deploying new features brainstormed with some of our users.

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

Agglom enhance Agglomerator and fully supports PicLens

After 3 months from the first release we are so satisfied to see users that use Agglom to save their browser sessions, to save researches on specific topics, to share sets of links.

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

Beta 2.1 released – straight down to 3.0

Based on the feedbacks received by our dear users, we release Beta 2.1. Here is a shortened changelist:

• 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)

Agglom Beta 2 is out!

Well, it was even difficoult to have time to take some screenshot of the first release, as well as it last about 2 weeks before the Beta 2 came out

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:

Agglom Beta 1 screenshot

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:

Agglom Beta 2 screenshot

Hope you’ll enjoy it :

www.agglom.com