Create a Tour of Web Pages with Agglom
Sharing web pages in a conversation shouldn't be as tricky as it is. Sometimes you're on the phone, or speaking to a group of people and there isn't a handy way to bring people along with you from page to page and then let them have easy access to those pages after the conversation is through.
Enter Agglom, a simple little service built by Italian developer Enrico Foschi. It's a Firefox plug-in that will make sharing a list of links far easier than it's been before.
How It Works
Agglom is a remarkably easy way to create a "slide show" of live links that you can share with other people. See the screencast demo we recorded below.
For those who prefer to read, there's a text description after the video.
After downloading the plug-in, you can click on the Agglom button at any time. It captures all the URLs from each tab in your browser. After making some admin decisions, including public/private or password protection, you receive one link that you can share with anyone else. They can then follow through the slide show along with you, access it later, get any changes made to it by RSS, leave comments and suggest additional links.
It's simple but looks quite useful.
Presentation Is Powerful
Earlier this month we wrote about five lightweight apps that are useful for web consultants and trainers. If we had known about Agglom then (we just discovered it today via Marjolein Hoekstra's blog CleverClogs) it would have made a great fit there as well.
The web is changing so fast and there's so much information available that providing accessible ways clearly show people what you're talking about is the best way to help friends, family and co-workers wrap their minds around the powerful new tools now available.
Agglom is simple - that's good. It also looks quite useful. That's a sweetspot for applications these days. Can you imagine using it? We can.
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Looks really useful.
And Marjolein Hoekstra's endorsement automatically pushes it up to an A+ in my book :)
I've used GoToMeeting a bunch of times when I was really trying to share web sites as opposed to drive the flow. This would be plenty.
Auto publish to Slideshare and Facebook would be good IMHO.
P.S. nifty screencast, Marshall.
Hey Marshall,
Did you look at the app I have made: http://myjugaad.in/ ?
It is a slideshow for webpages, which are sourced either from popular websites such as del.icio.us (for best webpages), digg (for most entertaining stories), google news (for latest news), yahoo, flickr, youtube, etc. or from a list provided by you or from your RSS feed(s)
The differentiating factor of MyJugaad.in from Agglom is that:
1. Slideshows can be made from popular web services such as Yahoo Search, Flickr, etc.
2. The webpages can be sourced from (multiple) RSS Feed(s)
3. Slideshows can be embedded in blogs or websites with ease
Hope you like it. And, if possible, review it on RWW.
-Paras Chopra
Dear Marshall,
thank you so much for this post. I'm so glad to read it and to see you liked Agglom's services.
As you mentioned, yes, the Web is huge and web surfers spend a lot of time when they search for something specific.
Yes, they find almost everything they need. But I thought that most of the time we spend on the web is spent searching for something.
And most of us do a lot of similar research, maybe on the same topic.
If we could start to save them, people would find for almost every topic organized contents that could satisfy their needs. Organizers would save their time (won't do the same research again) and help other ones as well sharing their efforts.
Then, Web Slideshow and RSS feeds are just some of the services offered to browse / share the saved organized contens. These ones were suggested by Marjolein Hoekstra (http://www.CleverClogs.org).
As you wrote, Agglom could be used for many purposes: could be useful to trainers, web consultants, to student that would like to share their researches or to users that would like to save and share their browser session (this is why we released the Firefox add-on).
As you see, users feedback is the most important thing for us. The development follow an Agile process (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agile_software_development) and what in Agile is called "customer" in Agglom is the "user".
Our key is a frequent communication with our users and in order to get as much comments / feedback / suggestions / idea / critics as possible and to discuss with them further development and features that would really bring them real benefits.
Talking about this, is there any area you would like to improve or any service you would like to see in Agglom?
Thanks,
Enrico Foschi
http://www.agglom.com
Great! I've been needing something like this for quite some time.