Agglom – the next generation of social bookmarking

Hi All

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

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

Hello World! Agglom is out!

Hello World!

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