Iterasi makes social bookmarking timeless

Iterasi is a new bookmarking tool previewing today at DEMO. I got a demo of the service in action a few weeks back, and am looking forward to getting my hands on it for a review when the beta begins within the next month. The basic premise of Iterasi is that you can save any page you're looking at for later. It's almost like a screenshot, except that it preserves links, formatting, and any content that was on the page when you were viewing it at that moment. The end result is a bookmark that you can share with others that retains what the page looked like at that point in time. The creators tell me this is especially handy if you want to show someone a page that's behind a security login or on a local intranet.

To begin saving bookmarks on Iterasi, users need to install a small browser plug-in that will let them "notarize" any page they're on for later retrieval. I told the creators the notarize moniker reminded me of getting legal documents signed, but they think it will grow on users, and that it made more sense than making up some word that just sounded nice. The notarize button resides in the top right-hand corner of your browser, and also lets you jump to your bookmark list with one mouse click.

(Credit: Iterasi.com)

To sort through all your notarized content there's a home screen that lists everything in reverse chronology and can be parsed quickly using any tags you've added. You can either browse by text links that looks a little similar to the detailed file view in Windows Explorer, or a list view, which shows each saved site as a thumbnail. The service has a built-in search tool that will sort through the tags, site names, and any content that was stored on each page. You can also put multiple items into folders, and send them off to other Iterasi users, or your contacts via e-mail.

One of the most interesting features, and one I'm really looking forward to getting my hands on, is the scheduler. This tool will let you go in and schedule times when you want Iterasi to go to a certain Web page and take a snapshot right down to the hour. Iterasi's creators tell me this could be useful for chronicling something like a social networking profile, or the front page of a news site, which brought back memories of that cool TechMeme video from a few weeks back where the entire day of news was condensed down to a minute. I have my own plans to use the service as a personal archiving service, as one of my favorite research tools is the Internet Archive and its massive collection of partially complete sites from the late 1990s.

A video overview of the service is embedded below. We'll try to get a hands-on as soon as we can.