Iterasi goes live with personal Web-archiving tool

Web bookmarking tool Iterasi just launched the first version of its Firefox extension to people who have signed up for the beta. The service, which I wrote about in January, lets you capture a Web site in its entirety, complete with links, formatting, and a time stamp to help sort it out later.

The company was set to release the plug-in back in late February but has been busy for the past few months resolving some security issues, as well as tweaking usability with a small group of beta testers. One of the reasons for the delay was to ramp up the sharing feature, which now lets users embed a notarized page on their blog or Web site like I've done below. I've had a chance to use the service over the past day, and it's definitely got the makings of a really engaging bookmarking tool.

All your saved pages can be browsed and sorted quickly with Iterasi's dashboard (click to enlarge).

Once installed, Iterasi puts a small selection of buttons in your browser's toolbar. There's a button to skip to your notaries, as well as two ways to notarize whatever page you're on: either a full option that lets you add tags and put the page in a special folder before filing, or a quickie option that will save the page with one click. My immediate qualm is that all of them have identical little icons and letter shortcuts that aren't exactly intuitive, however, as soon as you've used it once, you'll know where everything is.

The service is on the slow side when it comes time to "notarize" pages (aka slurping up all the content), but once it's been captured it's incredibly snappy to browse through. Users must first wait for whatever page they're on to load completely, and then it will slurp it up and file it away. Creating folders and tags is a snap, and you can quickly amass a huge collection of pages you've captured, which can be sorted in about a half dozen ways.

Sadly missing at this time is the scheduling feature that lets users automatically capture snapshots of their favorite sites at whatever times they choose, something I was looking forward to setting up to capture the front pages of several news and social bookmarking sites. I'm told the scheduling feature will be in place in the next 30 days, the creators just wanted to get a simpler working version out to people to try out before ramping up the servers to scale with the influx of captured pages. Also worth noting is that your computer must be on or in standby mode for pages to be captured, as the capturing is done on your side and not Iterasi's--something that might change with the introduction of a Pro plan later down the line.

Iterasi is currently in a private beta, but you can sign up for it on this page or grab an account anytime someone has shared an Iterasi saved page with you. Below is a capture of the front page of Digg.com from yesterday. Since then, all of the stories have received more diggs and run off the front page, but this captured it like a live screenshot.

[alexhwilliams]

Thanks for the detailed post about iterasi. The scheduler is mighty cool. We will hustle to get it done. The icons in the toolbar is a work in progress. I do agree it is fairly intuitive once you give it a go.