AdaptiveBlue recently released a new version of their BlueOrganizer Mozilla Firefox extension. As I wrote about in August of last year, BlueOrganizer is a tagging and search tool designed to help organize and bookmark found on the web. It allows for the personalization of content found on sites such as Amazon and eBay, tracking and managing books, movies, music and anything else on the web, providing a more intelligent way to store items which are of interest to you.

Several significant changes have been made for BlueOrganizer 3.2. These changes did not really affect the visual interface of BlueOrganizer but affected the insides of the extension, making it easier to store and organize the information and providing an improved ablity to publish the stored content on the web. Some of the major improvements include:

BlueBadges

BlueBadges are external widgets/gadgets that can easily be placed on any web page or blog. These badges are designed to show your visitors things that you find interesting and would like to share with others. For example, if you have a Wordpress powered blog with a theme that supports widgets using a BlueBadge is as easy as cutting and pasting the code created into a text widget. The BlueBadges can be created within BlueOrganizer or at Widget Box. Alternatively you can still use a Wordpress RSS widget to display an RSS feed of one of your collections on your site. Below is a BlueBadge sample showing my book collection in BlueOrganizer and one showing my music collection.

Blue Links

BlueOrganizer provides excellent integration with sites like del.icio.us, Digg and Facebook through the use of BlueLinks. Using BlueOrganizer with these sites will allow other users of BlueOrganizer to right click on a link and bring about their smart BlueMenu. For example, they could digg the link or find out more about it on flickr.

BlueMarks

BlueOrganizer features automatic analysis of your browser’s history to help in configuring BlueMenu. For sites like Del.icio.us or Digg, BlueOrganizer can automatically catalog and arrange your history. You can automatically BlueMark sites that are posted to several social sites, also. For example, if you post a book you like to del.icio.us, it will be automatically BlueMarked and added to your BlueOrganizer book collection.

Simplified Configuration Options

One of the nicer things about this new version of BlueOrganizer is a cleaner set of configuration options. They are now more intuitive and are easier to handle. Options have been placed in more logical groupings and the whole system of posting items has became easier and smarter.

Summary

While BlueOrganizer could still become more user friendly the latest changes to BlueOrganizer are a welcome addition. There are still some minor annoyances like not being able to edit the title of an item and having no easy way to set the status and rating fields back to their default. The publishing options and secure storage on Amazon S3 which allows for automatic synchronization between computers (see this post on AdaptiveBlue’s privacy policy) are nice features. AdaptiveBlue continues to be very innovative with BlueOrganizer. In addition, AdaptiveBlue recently raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Union Square Ventures and has been selected as an official recommendation on the Firefox 2.0 add-ons page which should mean additional growth and innovation with BlueOrganizer. If you are a Mozilla Firefox or Flock user and are looking for a way to organize and share information BlueOrganizer is worth a serious look.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 26th, 2007 at 11:56 am and is filed under Firefox. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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