Qitera: Social Bookmarking for the Deep Web
Earlier this year, we featured a stealth startup called Qitera, which just launched publically today. At its core, Qitera is a social bookmarking service, but unlike most of its competitors, Qitera can not only save a screenshot of the site, but also the full text of every web page you bookmark, including those hidden behind paywalls. Qitera is probably best understood as an interesting mashup of Furl, delicious, and Twine, with a little bit of Iterasi thrown in for good measure.
When we first wrote about Qitera, it looked like a semantic web app, but in the public version that is available now, these semantic features have taken a backseat in favor of creating a very capable social bookmarking service.
The emphasis of the application is on its ability to search the full text of your bookmarked sites, even if those were originally hidden behind paywalls or if you had to log in to the site. This is great if you want to save bookmarks for research, or even if you just want to keep a copy of a social network profile.
Features
In Qitera, you can organize your bookmarks around 'topics.' These topics can also be shared with your contacts on Qitera, though it doesn't seem like Qitera allows for collaborative bookmarking.
You can also see an Iterasi-like live copy of your bookmarked site, though Qitera sadly doesn't recognize when you save the same page twice.
Among Qitera's other interesting features are a Cover Flow-like view of your screenshots, the ability to rate other users' shared items, and a news feed with updates from all your contacts.
Qitera works with every browser. Firefox users can install a small extension, while IE, Safari, or Chrome users get a bookmarklet with the same functionality.
What's Missing?
One feature we are missing from Qitera is the ability to share a certain topic directly on the web. While Qitera is currently a great private research tool, being able to share your topics publically would be also be very useful.
It would also be nice if you could share items not just with other Qitera users, but also with your friends on FriendFeed, Twitter, or Facebook. While Qitera allows you to bookmark and search sites hidden behind paywalls, the site itself does feel a bit like a walled garden (which, for a lot of users, may not even be a bad thing).
Verdict
At first, we were skeptical about yet another social bookmarking tool, but after testing it for a while, we can see how Qitera can be a highly useful research tool - especially thanks to its ability to bookmark and search pages from the 'deep web.' Instead of just having to rely on tags, you can now create small, custom search engines for all of your bookmarks.
Comments
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Interesting service, but:
"One feature we are missing from Qitera is the ability to share a certain topic directly on the web."
I agree, in fact foldier.com allows to do just that (we call them sPressions). Users can publish not only bookmarked pages but also articles coming from connected RSS feeds and media embedded in major web sites.
You can check my sPression on digital photography:
http://www.foldier.com/spression.aspx?ID=2261293
What is missing for me is an import option from delicious and co...
I agree the bookmarking/clipping space is crowded, but there's definitely room for entrants since the space is full with offers that don't offer the complete solution.
Right now I've been using Evernote and Diigo (which I have connected to delicious). It was annoying that Diigo could not clip stuff behind password protected sites.
Look forward to trying this one out, but its definitely going to need an import, and it should also enable me to post my bookmarks to delicious.
I clip from Diigo, but most of my searches for things are through Delicious.
Thanks for the coverage.
We thought a lot about the pros & cons of public topics and decided to launch without.
Qitera is all about granular collaboration around topics in trusted circles (teams, family, work groups, classes).
It's easy to pass topics around so they can reach semi-public visibility in larger circles.
We got a lot of user feedback regarding import capabilities and findability of people inside Qitera. Some work to do :-)
I've had the good fortune to be "in" on this since the Semantic Technology Conference earlier this year. At the Fairmont, their CEO showed me a demo, told me where they plan to take Qitera. (During a keynote Conference session I chaired, Qitera was summarily dismissed -- and dissed -- by Nova Spivack, the CEO of Radar Networks.)
I'm glad to see that they have a semweb "engine" (Open Calais), probably the key to their "Discover" feature, but have spent most of their time working on their UI/UX. In fact, I'd argue that Qitera looks cleaner and more professional than their key competitors like Twine.
Here's an idea: How about a story comparing Furl, Twine, Qitera, Iterasi, Foldier, Zotero, ScrapBook, Spurl, Clipmarks, Glue. Yeah, not exactly an apples-to-apples comparison, but I'd like to see a third party review. I wouldn't be surprised if many (most?) primarily using one of these services would find much more value if they switched to another as their primary service. And, let's face it, the real world doesn't want to use a gazillion services; arguably, they're not thrilled with ANY service since none of the above have reached any sort of critical mass (even delicious is still a niche app).
Very good introduction to another !!! social bookmarking service. It meets most of our needs as virtual working community. We have to use more than one webservice and several desktop applications including google desktop search (enabled with shared indexing in all computers We use) to get the same result for what Qitera offers. From Alexa extension in IE recommending related services gathering our attention data, yahoo bookmarking, Hindsite (australian firm offering personal web history search) Internet as a collaborative tool has evolved a lot and moving up. Pity is there is no course offered to train people using these web2 applications. We are trying our best in our Project Vyas.
This looks very promising!
It has both bookmarking functions but also notetaking - which can handles notes in rich text format (which means it can be used for including formatted text and pictures) - really good.
I have just started to explore this and are very excited over this service. Several dissapointments last month with crappy webservices like the not very useful and really prettu unnecessary "Webnotes" or Microsofts clumsy Thumbtack. But this really look like an interesting service! Looking forvard to evaluate this!
And i really thinks there is room for this kind of service! Sure, bookmarking in the sense of "saving an url wit attached tags" have many vendors - but there has always been a lack of additional options for saving notes or editing bookmarks. Many webservices, including diigo, dont even have an option to edit the url or edit in a rich text format editor! Very strange. So this service , Qitera, comes as a very fresh new thing on the market, something I and many with me have sought for a while.
What I miss, though, is functions for editing your contents (aka you items) - there seems not to be possible to edit the content at all? This must change to make this service useful.
I also think it would be great to have the possibility to save portions of pages, not only whole pages. Also to make highlights in your portions
The teqnique is there - you already have rich text format notes,you just have to add the ability to highlight a text and have it saved directly to a note by pressing the qitera key would be useful