Web page archiving tool Iterasi is getting a small but important update Tuesday morning. Users can now share their stream of archived pages with others as an RSS feed, letting anyone view their saved items either directly in their browser or in a feed-capturing tool like Google Reader or desktop e-mail clients.
Also being introduced is a new widget that can be tacked onto your blog or favorite start page like iGoogle or My Yahoo. It will display a reverse chronological stream of the latest pages you've tucked away. Each item is just a thumbnail, but when users click on it they'll be taken to the fully archived version of the page, complete with working links. It's the same basic experience seen when the service launched its sharing feature.
"What's surprising is how many of our users were asking for RSS feeds," Iterasi CEO Pete Grillo told me. Grillo acknowledged that the current Iterasi user base is a bit on the early-adopter side, and he thinks the widgets will help open the service up to a wider audience.
He also expects more people to jump onboard as the platform expands to include Mac users, which should be happening in the next few weeks--right around the time the long-awaited auto-archiving feature makes its way into users hands. "We're close to having it ready," Grillo said "and RSS is going to make it far more useful than we originally intended." Once in place users, will be able to schedule when they want the service to take snapshots of their favorite pages. It will continue to do so as long as the computer where the extension is installed is running.
I've embedded an example of the new widget after the break. It'll continue to update as more pages are saved.
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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.
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