One of the big problems with using the Internet is remembering what you’ve looked at. Sure, bookmarks can be a great help but often you loose the context of what it was that mattered enough to bookmark because the page contents change and or the bookmark doesn’t convey enough information about the contents.
One of the big problems with using the Internet is remembering what you’ve looked at. Sure, bookmarks can be a great help but often you lose the context of what it was that mattered enough to bookmark because the page contents change and or the bookmark doesn’t convey enough information about the contents.
To solve this problem along came all sorts of Web “clipping” services some of which worked very well. Today’s focus, iCyte is a new competitor in this market that offers the best combination of features and usability that I’ve found so far.
ICyte is a free browser add-on compatible with Firefox 3.0+ and IE 7+ on Microsoft Windows (XP, Vista, Server 2003), OS X, and Linux (the cross platform support is really useful). Once installed, iCyte is available in the right click context menu when the mouse is over a page, via toolbar buttons, from the Tools menu (Firefox only).
When you find a Web page with useful content you simply invoke iCyte to create a “cyte.” If you have selected content iCyte will remember that block in context, that is, it will save the entire page with that block highlighted. Either way, that’s a key issue with iCyte: It records the entire page thus keeping your Web clipping in context.
You can also select which of your projects to save the cyte in and add tags. Projects are simply collections of cytes and can be kept private or made public. Public projects have newsfeeds (which offers interesting mashup possibilities), can be embedded in Web pages, and can be shared via a wide range of bookmarking and social networking services including Facebook, Twitter, Digg, MySpace, and so on.
Through the iCyte interface you can see your saved cytes, add and edit comments and tags, move them to other projects, and go from the saved view of a cyte to the “live” view of the content. You can also export cytes to Microsoft Word of Excel and e-mail individual cytes directly from iCyte.
This tool really is about the best attempt I’ve seen at a Web clipping service simply because not only does it save your cytes in context, it also adds so much value to the process of saving, managing, and sharing what are, in effect, bookmarks of steroids. There are a couple of additions I’d like to see such as the ability to create sub-projects to allow for hierarchical organization of cytes and a PDF export facility.
As a user wrote on the Firefox iCyte add-on page: “I’m not usually one to rave about an add-on, but this one has been seriously online-life changing in a short space of time. It’s completely changing the way I research on the internet as I don’t have to worry about pages going out of date or getting shifted – because these guys save the page for me.”
The icing of the iCyte cake is the service’s API, a RESTful interface that with authentication supports the searching, listing, and retrieval of cytes and projects in an account or other iCyte users’ public cytes the account has saved. All of the documented methods are currently read-only although obviously cyte creation and editing APIs exist; let’s hope this is for exposed in the near future as it would allow for the integration of all sorts of catalogs and services.
The reason that the API excites me is that the iCyte publishers get it: You can’t possibly conceive of all the uses that data can be put to and supporting extensibility by third parties is a powerful and strategic way to get a market to form around your concept.
Like the enthusiastic user I quoted above, I love iCyte. The service makes tracking and sharing what you’re interested in not only easier but also much more effective.
