Eluma | Blog

Most everyone is familiar with using folders to organize their files, thanks to Windows Explorer, Mac OS, and the gazillions of products that use the folder paradigm.

Not everyone is familiar with tagging, though.

Sometimes using a folder structure works better, and sometimes tagging works better (which is why we built Eluma to allow objects to be classified using both tags and folders).

Some of the advantages of working with tags over folders include:

• You can add as many tags as you want to an object, so that you can later find the object by any of its tags. With folders, you'd need to copy the object into multiple locations.
• You can easily add and remove any tags on an object to reclassify it.
• Content within tags is self-organizing (watch the video to see what I mean by this and how folders don't enable this).
• You can usually infer what an object is about by reading its list of tags.

We created a short, informative video to illustrate the differences between folders and tags here:

Amidst the hullaballoo for FriendFeed, the new service that aggregates feeds from the various web 2.0 services like Twitter, Digg, and StumbleUpon, has been the emergence of desktop clients built specifically to expose FriendFeed data as soon as it gets published, so as not to incur even the slightest delay watching the real-time chatter :-). TechCrunch recently wrote another post on that topic here.

Since Eluma is built to aggregate any feeds or content you choose, and one of the things that Eluma does is to expose feeds as desktop alerts, I thought I would see how Eluma stacks up as a client for FriendFeed. You will notice that there was no API integration required - just out of the box functionality for exposing FriendFeed feeds as alerts.

Here's the video. Please tell us what you think!

...or "What I did on spring break"

It turns out that launching in a private beta release was a very good idea :-).  It helps a lot to get feedback from some new people that are starting without any preconceived ideas, or at least different preconceived ideas, and are certified kool-aid free.  We're also fortunate to have beta testers that used Eluma across a wider set of use cases than we could ever hope to do internally.

So what did we learn?

Web Access

Although we always had browser based access to a user's data high up on the product roadmap, private beta escalated this requirement. So as a result, we are implementing browser based access to public collections, and we're also working on providing browser based access through a secure sign on process so that an Eluma user can see all of their folders and subfolders, tagged and flagged items, and smartlists from any machine via a browser.

Offline Access

Eluma's offline access capabilities were an important feature to many users.  There were some good suggestions for how to make it better, like caching more content (such as web pages) for offline access.  So you'll see even more content available when you're offline.

Local Search

Providing a local search tab (restricting search to your local data) was also on the list for this release, so it was no surprise that the beta testers confirmed that it's a vital feature.

More search engine options

This one snuck up on me. I am pretty much search engine agnostic so I was OK with having no search engine options. However, based on user feedback, it appears that users don't want to be forced into using a specific vendor's web search, so we now allow you to choose between Google, Yahoo!, Ask, and Microsoft search in the browser toolbar, and Google and Yahoo! search from the desktop application.

Usability

We've put a lot of effort into improving the usability of Eluma, consistent with our goal to make using Eluma be second nature, especially for casual computer users - people that just go online to check email and search for a few sites.  Some of the features we're adding include:

• Improved navigation menus and behavior in the Eluma Desktop.  You'll see that our left hand navigation pane provides a lot more room for objects, and the behavior is more predictable.  We've also changed the navigation tree based on some good feedback we've received.

• There are new options for desktop alerts. One new option that we are working on that may NOT make it into this release is the ability to Collect/Rate/Tag/Flag an Alert item from the popup. I hope that we can squeeze it in, but we have to draw the line somewhere. :-)

• We have added the ability to Collect/Rate/Tag/Flag individual RSS items in a feed, and we treat the items like bookmarks. I love this feature, it makes reading very active RSS feeds like Engadget or Digg so much easier and more efficient.

• We have improved the navigation of collected content from the browser toolbar.

• We now support automatic completion of tag names, and we support multi-word tags. These two were really "no brainers" we just had to get to them on the list.
   

Performance and Additional Platform Support

It might be boring to the typical end user, but I am glad that we were able to make significant performance enhancements across a variety of areas in the product, including search, synchronization of content across multiple machines, and for communicating with the server.  We've also added support for 64 bit support machines, and for the Firefox 3 browser.

We think that these new features promise to make the public beta version of Eluma 2.0 significantly more functional and even easier to use than the private beta version.  We're excited to wrap up public beta and get it out to you shortly.  We appreciate all the feedback we've gotten from you so far.  It's hugely helpful for us.

Thanks!

Right on the heels of my last post, Erick Schoenfeld of TechCrunch writes that after installing Twhirl, his information overload problem got worse, not better! He makes the case that he needs less data, not more. "There is too much to pay attention to and not enough ways to reduce the noise... what we really need are better filters."

Exactly!

Coincidentally, today Tech News World published an article that I wrote for them that discusses exactly this issue, titled "I am an information junkie, and I suffer from information overload!"

Of course, we couldn't agree more with Erick, and that's exactly what we're trying to address here at Eluma :-)

Karina Wright has an interesting post titled Avoiding Social Media Burnout over at Smarter Than Your Average Blog. She brings up a very interesting point that is worth taking a critical look at.

I am not going to paraphrase her article, go read it, its well worth it.

The reason that her article strikes a chord for me is that I have taken the social media break that Karina suggests, and in many ways I am still on it; I don't think that I will ever go all the way back to my old "social media ways".

I always thought that social media was more about the wisdom of crowds, but somehow it devolved into hyper-instant-messaging; people micro blogging their lunch menu does nothing for me. I don't care that you are at NAMM and standing in front of the latest Roland synth; wait until you get to your hotel room and give me the details. And even THAT turns into a time sink. There are a handful of blogs that I actually read every post, the rest I cruise through on occasion looking for gems; I really am looking for the haystack full of needles and I think that the wisdom of crowds can help.

Digg is a great example of the wisdom of crowds working. Sure there are a few gamers, but for the most part the system works. I can go to digg and get the latest news as seen throught the eyes of the digg community. The digg system basically works, I never see spam on the front page and the gamers don't mess it up TOO bad.

The one problem that I have with digg is that that the crowd whose wisdom I am trying to capture may be too big and diverse. But I will post on that later. :)

On March 18 we will be releasing Eluma 2.0 into private beta. So, a little history is in order...

I started Eluma with my friend Paul Christen in 2006 because we noticed that even with all the incredible innovation that's happening on the web, we couldn't find any good tools to help regular people organize everything they do online. iTunes does this for all of your music files. Outlook does this for your email and appointments. We kept asking ourselves, "why hasn't anyone built something like Outlook for all your web stuff?"

When we did our initial research, we found that most people were just using favorites in IE, bookmarks in Firefox, or emailing web site URLs to themselves to keep track of their stuff. Certainly not the most organized way to manage all the content they were finding online. So that's the problem we set out to solve.

In Eluma, we're combining folder and tag based organization techniques and intelligent "smartlists," with sharing, with community interaction, and with "social search." Some people will want to keep their stuff completely private, and that's cool. We are strong proponents of keeping private stuff private. Eluma is a great tool to help those folks stay organized. Some people will want to share what they're organizing in Eluma with their friends, or with team members at work. Eluma is great for that, too. And some other people will want to take advantage of the new techniques around social search to find new information that they won't easily find on Google. And we think Eluma is great for that, too.

We built Eluma to help:

• organize all of your web content from your existing browser(s), bookmark manager(s), as well as new content you discover while browsing the web. We try to make it seamless for you to organize your content into "collections," or with tags, without doing a lot of extra work;
• share collections of content that you build with a friend, a group of friends or co-workers, or with the entire Eluma community;
• interact and collaborate with other users around content and collections of content;
• get alerted in real time on your desktop to whatever information/feeds you choose;
• discover content and collections of content that have been organized and recommended by other Eluma users. You can subscribe to these collections, and you can pull any of the content into your own collections.

We're finding that it's not just individuals that are attracted to Eluma. Enterprises that are trying to find ways to bring the usability advancements brought about by Web 2.0 technologies (things like using tags to organize information instead of adopting and enforcing a rigid taxonomy) are finding Eluma is helping improve knowledge sharing and collaboration among their employees. Web 2.0 meets the enterprise!

We built Eluma as an application that resides on your computer, not as a browser based application. As you can imagine, this was the subject of some pretty intense debates around here. But browser based applications can sometimes be a bit limiting in terms of their usability, especially when it comes to organizing, managing, and browsing large amounts of information. If you're using Eluma to organize lots of web information, we think you'll appreciate the difference in usability, not to mention that there are a whole bunch of performance related things that we can do better in an application like this, including pre-fetching information that you've subscribed to, and caching it so that it's already there when you ask for it, even when you're offline. We expect to take some criticism for this decision, but we strongly believe people will find the difference in usability is worth it.

Our name may sound familiar to some. We originally launched V1.0 of Eluma back at the DEMO conference last year, where Chris Shipley and her panel of judges awarded us a DEMOGod. V2.0 builds on that version, but whereas V1.0 was a product for our distribution partners like traffic.com and WHDH-TV, in V2.0 we've added personal productivity and organizational capabilities that make it well suited for anybody with a browser, an Internet connection, and more than a handful of links they're interested in tracking.

We still work with brands. Very soon any brand will be able to use self-service tools to skin Eluma to look like it's their app, pre-populate Eluma with their content, and distribute it to their customers who want to stay current on news and information from their favorite content provider, and to get a useful personal organization tool emblazoned with their favorite brand.

And what's with our name?! Well, we're trying to make it easy to organize and keep track of your online stuff. We're hoping we can bring a little "elumanation" to your online world!

So we're obviously all really excited to get Eluma 2.0 out the door. We hope you try it. And we hope you like it!

Thanks.

Richard Buck, CEO