Luca’s Simpsons-Family Guy-Futurama

March 20, 2009 by Michele Ursino

We would like to spotlight Bottaro’s sPression on the popular cartoons, Family Guy, Futurama, and The Simpsons. Luca’s sPression utilizes our ability to drag and drop videos directly into his sPression. Rather than having to search the web for his favorite videos, we bring it directly to Luca. So Luca can choose his favorite clips and share them all with his friends.

With the introduction of our linking to Hulu.com and Fancast.com, Luca could display entire seasons of his favorite shows on his sPression or just his favorite clips. Bottaro has used his sPression to create his own personal highlight reel of his favorite moments.

Simpsons - Family guy - Futurama sPression

Simpsons - Family guy - Futurama sPression

The foldier team.

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foldier sPress featuring Paolo Pontoniere

March 16, 2009 by Michele Ursino

We introduced foldier sPress just a bit more than a couple of months ago. Now, we are starting to see some interesting use of this new application. So we will start posting here some of the most interesting sPressions.

Let’s start with “L’altra Faccia delle News” (“The other side of the news”) an sPression by Paolo Pontoniere.

L'Altra Faccia delle News

L'Altra Faccia delle News

Paolo Pontoniere is a Journalist. Living in San Francisco: “reporting about everything that moves under the Sun, and very often also about what doesn’t pulse or can’t be seen, like business and economics” .

The sPression reports good articles and links in Italian and English.

Paolo has two blogs: Glocanomica in Italian (c/o IFAF – Finance Training) and Vironomics in English (c/o L’espresso).

To see Paolo’s and other popular sPressions visit foldier sPress .

Michele Ursino

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Interoperability at work

December 29, 2008 by Michele Ursino

At this point is clear we believe interoperability between Web Services through open API and standard protocols is key for the development of the Internet Platform. So I want to start writing about some simple example that should clarify how effective and powerful the Interoperable Internet can be.

A first – very simple – example comes from a feature we want to add to foldier. We want to automatically post on twitter a note when sPressing an article with a comment from within foldier. The comment used in foldier will be the post in twitter along the link to the posted item.

We don’t have this feature yet but a recent video from Robert Scoble about FriendFeed made me realize I could setup these three services (foldier, friendfeed and twitter) so to provide with a similar capability.

Here is how in two simple steps:

1 – Given an sPression in foldier import its RSS feed as a blog in FriendFeed.

In FriendFeed select Import site
Under Blogging click on Blog
Type (or paste) the URL of the sPression in the Blog URL text box
Click on Import Blog

2 – Setup your account in FriendFeed to post on twitter when new items from the added blog are found

Still in FriendFeed click on Account (on the top of the page)
Under the Feed Publishing section check the mark where it says Post my FriendFeed on Twitter
Enter you Twitter credentials and check the mark for the feed imported in step1

This setup will import the sPression RSS feed in FriendFeed and trigger a twitt message automatically when new items are discovered.
This very simple setup is possible because of the RSS protocol and the Twitter API.
Now, the RSS allows two services (foldier and FriendFeed) that don’t know each other to communicate effectively. If there was a standatd API for MicroBlogging and multiple services implementing it we could connect FriendFeed to one or more compatible MicroBlogging services.

With this setup we do not get the comment entered in foldier during the sPression of an item into the message in Twitter, we get the title of the article instead.
This is good enough for now, so check an example of posted Twitt from a published item in foldier here:
http://twitter.com/micurs/status/1085130756

Michele Ursino

Blogged with the Flock Browser

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More on the the Interoperable Internet: the rise of the Internet OS.

December 9, 2008 by Michele Ursino

Michele UrsinoI am writing this post with Flock, a new web browser (yes another one) based on Firefox engine. In fact it is Firefox with tools attached to it.

One of these tool is a “blog editor” the allows me to write a blog and submit the content to a blog engine like WordPress.

The magic is performed yet again by an open standard API called MetaWeblog.

I believe in a few years we will see the emerging of we can call the “Internet API”.

That will be nothing less than a collection of API established as standard and used by most systems online.
This will create a “de facto” OS, totally hosted in the cloud. Writing applications on this platform will consist of connecting together “abstract” services (using standard APIs). The user will choose which concrete service to use with the application depending on personal preferences.

So, a blogging platform will connect an editor, a commenting system, a layout editor, an aggragation engine, a picture browser and so on. The user will pick the services she already use or will subscribe to whatever is more convenient.

No one will own this platform: no Microsoft,  or Google, or Sun, or Facebook or anyone else.

Foldier is moving in this direction. We believe in the Interoperable Internet and we will use standard API whenever possible. We will make our service interoperable offering our own API, and we will adopt standard protocols when they exist.
 
We believe this trend is strong and will get even stronger in the near future. Do you?

- Michele Ursino

Blogged with the Flock Browser

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sPressing media content

December 1, 2008 by Michele Ursino

The latest release of foldier is introducing sPress: an application that allows any foldier user to produce ‘blog’ style pages with content collected from the Internet (blogs, Internet searches, Twitters, YouTube etc).

With this new version we improved the “Add to Foldier” bookmarklet as well.

( See my post: “Adding links and RSS feeds to foldier” to learn the basic of the bookmarklet ).

Now you can add media content to your sPression while you are surfing the Internet and without having to access foldier site directly. When you visit any web site you can click on the “Add to foldier” button (the bookmarklet) in your “Bookmarks Toolbar” to add that page to foldier.

Now we added some extra capabilities to allow this tool to understand “Media Content” embedded in the pages of some popular site. So, when you use the bookmarklet on one the following sites:

amazon.com  (amazon products)
youtube.com (video)
vimeo.com  (video)
viddler.com  (video)
slideshare.com (flash slideshow)
revision3.com  (video)
metacafe.com  (video)
hulu.com  (video)
funnyordie.com  (video)
flickr.com (video and photos)
docstoc.com (flash documents)

You will be prompted to choose the “Content” within the page or the page itself.

Adding a YouTube video to foldier

When you pick the content (a video or a product or a document) a representation of it becomes available as a separate entity within foldier. For example a video from YouTube becomes available as video object you can post in any of your sPression. This way, adding media to your sPression becomes as simple as clicking on a menu option!

To see an example check the “quick introduction video” posted on the sPression called “Who’s talking about foldier?” and try it for yourself by adding rich content into your sPressions.

Enjoy!

Michele Ursino

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foldier sPress quick intro on Vimeo

November 24, 2008 by Michele Ursino

This quick introduction explains what a sPression is and how to create one.

more about "foldier sPress quick intro on Vimeo", posted with vodpod

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Find, Collect and… sPress !

November 21, 2008 by Michele Ursino

Welcome back. This blog has been inactive for some time. We have been very busy putting together the new version of foldier. We call it foldier sPress.

sPress is an application that lives within foldier and allows any foldier user to produce ‘blog’ style pages with content collected from the Internet. These pages are called sPressions.

foldier sPress allows you to quickly collect and review existing content. You don’t have to spend time compiling content or writing it up yourself. The process is so easy you can examine new content and publish it to your sPression in less than 5 minutes.

You can see an example of sPression here:

Silverlight by Antonio Pellizzaro

Silverlight by Antonio Pellizzaro

http://www.foldier.com/spression.aspx?ID=2261293

and here:

Digital Photography by Michele ursino

Digital Photography by Michele ursino

http://www.foldier.com/spression.aspx?ID=2278453

How it works

From within foldier you can create new sPressions. This is done using the sPress Wizard (from your account Home page). In the wizard you just type a few keywords and foldier will find sources for data matching your keywords.

Once you complete the wizard you will see the sPression appear in the sPression panel

spressionpanel1

And by clicking on the button below the sPression name ( # new items ready for review) you can access all the items retrieved by the connected sources. These are articles, videos, photos that may be candidate for publishing in your sPression.

You can review the content directly from within foldier, just hover the mouse on the item thumbnails…

spressionitempreview

When you find something worth your sPression you can publish it by dragging its thumbnail directly to the sPression box on the right side of the interface.

spressionpublish

You can add a quick comment on each post you publish – a sort of twitt – to express your 2 cents on the article.

Finding new fresh content

foldier will continuously update your sources and find new articles and will match these new finds against your sPressions so to provide you with fresh content ready for sPressing, every day!
In less the 5 minutes you can publish and comment articles, videos, web pages and more.

So, welcome to foldier sPress we really hope you will enjoy it as much as we do!

Michele Ursino

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Foldier Publishing: How and Why

August 5, 2008 by Michele Ursino

How to publish a foldier

Publishing in foldier is easy. Open the smart folder you want to publish (you will be in the My Items page), click on the ‘Folder’ menu button and hit Publish.

Publishing a smart folder from the 'folder' menu

Publishing a smart folder from the 'folder' menu

A this point foldier will open the Publishing Box and ask you three things:

1 – How many items you want to be visible to the outside

Publishing a smart folder generates a public page, a RSS feed and the ability to embed the folder as a widget within any HTML pages, blogs, social networks etc. You need to tell foldier how many articles will be broadcast at any given time. A number between 10 and 20 is the norm.

2 – If you want to publish all the items currently in the folder

This option will change the permissions to everything inside the current folder to Public. Only public items are visible through public folders to the outside.
If you already have some selected items marked as public and do not want everything else in the folder to be published then uncheck this option.

3 – Few words to describe your published folder

This is important because the description will appear on the top of the public page. So write something meaningful introducing your audience to the content of the page.

See here an example »

Why publishing a foldier?

You may want to publish a folder for all sort of reasons. Here I have a few for you (in random order):

  • Because you are an expert on a given subject and want to expose what is best (or worst) out there
  • Because you want to keep your friends informed and up to date on something you care
  • Because you want to show support to a cause
  • Because you are too lazy to write a blog and post everyday. It is just easier to publish who you agree with.
  • Because is fun
  • Because it aggregates news and web pages that are not available as RSS feeds
  • Because you are conspiracy theorist and want to create a feed with all the evidence of your case!
  • Because you want to show in your blog a list of articles relevant to your posts and want the list to be dynamic and changing…

And this list can go on …

We gather traffic statistics on all the published folders and the ‘Most Popular‘ section is updated every day. We look forward to see your editorial capabilities in action!

I will post next a few tips on how to setup within a foldier account a quick publishing system you can update everyday with just a few clicks of the mouse.

Michele Ursino

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The Interoperable Internet

August 4, 2008 by Michele Ursino

In a recent post Tim O’Reilly writes about an incumbent problem that the open source movement may encounter in a near future: the rise of cloud computing may create a new, proprietary lock-in where users are trapped by services holding their data rather than software installed on their machines.

I can see this problem very well. I think about it every time I hear this nonsense talk about some new sites becoming new platforms for the Internet. New and well established companies play this game: Google, Facebook, Salesforce, Microsoft and all the WebOS startups out there.  Their game is to reproduce – in some form or shape – what Microsoft has brilliantly done with Windows and the PC, and Apple with MAC OS.

Most people (but not Tim O’Reilly) do not see that the platform is already there! It’s called the Internet, or – as Tim writes it – The Interoperable Internet.

“Take note: All of the platform as a service plays, from Amazon’s S3 and EC2 and Google’s AppEngine to Salesforce’s force.com — not to mention Facebook’s social networking platform — have a lot more in common with AOL than they do with internet services as we’ve known them over the past decade and a half. Will we have to spend a decade backtracking from centralized approaches? The interoperable internet should be the platform, not any one vendor’s private preserve.” (Tim O’Reilly)

We could not agree more!

And don’t we all know that the AOL approach was not the right one? Don’t we all want a rich open platform where small and big applications can freely coexist and “interoperate”, allowing user’s data to move freely from one point to another?

We – here at foldier – believe the Interoperable Internet is the future. A platform no one owns. Where every user owns his or her data regardless of where it is stored. A platform that offers standard protocols application developers can use to connect the dots.

Use foldier a bit and you will quickly recognize that foldier does not hold any of your data, rather it links to it, organizes it and makes it available to you, wherever it may be. Foldier logically organizes your data; it does not change its physical location. Who cares where the data is as long as you can reach it? foldier lets you create your own version of the Internet, the one with the information you care the most; a central place where you can connect the services that make the most sense to you, not just the services provided by the people holding your data.

Keep following us here and on foldier.com. The vision is taking shape.

Michele Ursino

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Widgets!

August 4, 2008 by Michele Ursino

Few weeks ago we introduced the ‘Community’ section. This public part of the foldier web site features the most interesting and popular published foldiers from our users.

A published foldier is not just a public page connected to a user profile, but is also a RSS feed that can be connected to any RSS reader available, and a HTML widget that can be embedded in any public or private web page.

To generate the widget code to embed in a web page you can use the widget editor. Once you published a folder the widget editor is available in the folder menu.

Opening the widget editor for a published folder

Opening the widget editor for a published folder

Once you are in the editor you can adjust various display features, like dimension, style, etc.

Adjusting parameters and customize the appearance

Adjusting parameters and customize the appearance

When you satisfied you can grab the code (copy it in the clipboard) and use it in any page you like.

Getting the code!

Getting the code!

Here is an example of a foldier widget embedded within the social networking home page of BAIA LINK.

BAIA Link using foldier widget

BAIA Link using foldier widget

So enjoy and widgetize your public folders!

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