BlueOrganizer Gets Update

Like we mentioned back in November, BlueOrganizer is an extension meant to empower your searches. It’s meant to offer a way to find information that you want more quickly, and also provides intelligent ways to store what you’re interested in, be they things on your bookshelf, things you wish were on your bookshelf, etcetera. This goes for music, for movies, for miscellaneous products, whatever.

No major visual changes have been made to BlueOrganizer since its debut; its innards are the things that have received an overhaul. The only items to get further buffed and polished are BlueBadges, which are external widgets/gadgets you can place on your blog or Myspace page(s) to show visitors things you’ve labeled as interesting and feed-worthy in BlueOrganizer. BlueBadges definitely simplify the publishing process, as everything is done automatically via RSS. No continuous additions or alterations to your blog or the content in your Myspace account need to be made. At the end of the day, however, BlueBadges are meant to be afterthoughts, graphical goodies wrapped in Web 2.0 candy to share with friends and family.

As far as important features in BlueOrganizer go, the new AutoBlueMark feature takes the cake. You no longer need to click the BlueMark button in your Firefox or Flock browser toolbar of things you’re Digging throughout the day or items you’re adding to your Del.icio.us feed. If you use these two popular sites to discover new pages throughout your sessions online, BlueMark will automatically catalogue your histories and arrange them appropriately. Of course, it’d be thrilling to find a vast array of bookmarking options in the AutoBlueMark menu in BlueOrganizer (lotsa blue, eh?) from the get-go, but we’ll take what we’ve been offered thus far. Even though it’s limited to three items as this moment, it’s bound to grow.

BlueOrganizer has hardly shown its stripes in public for half a year. We’re going to give the team pulling the strings at least a few months before we start haranguing them for a “lack of options.” It’s only fair.

We mentioned something about consolidation before. In case you were wondering what we meant, we were referring to the consolidation of ‘Collections’ and ‘Actions’ into a MySites menu, where you can select which sites you see in your BlueMenu when searching, browsing new finds, and looking over your existing collections. We suspect the team received plenty of feedback from confused users about discrepancies in the BlueOrganizer. The revamp shows the folks at AdaptiveBlue understand customers quite well, which is sometimes a hit-or-miss relationship some developers have with a user base.

BlueMenu really is much more easy to handle. It’s gotten smarter about your searching habits and is more accurate with text, links, images, and whole-page content and themes. It’s less of a chore to work with, and that makes it a much better BlueOrganizer than what we’ve seen in the past. We were happy with the first-run edition, but it was relatively easy to find annoyances in the “system.” The new version is definitely the improvement we’ve been waiting for.