July 28, 2005

Update - Simpy (New Features)

Michael Arrington

5 comments »

Company: Simpy



Previous Profiles:
July 18, 2005

What’s New?

Simpy is a social bookmarking service that can be compared to Shadows, del.icio.us, Furl, Yahoo My Web 2.0 and others.

Simpy released new features today, including

- full text search of bookmarked sites
- a tag cloud of your bookmarks
- remove, rename, split, and merge tags

From Otis on the Simpy Blog:

“The Release Log has the details, but in short, I am happy to announce that the new Simpy release is out!

The most notable features concern searching and tagging.

The full-text search is back! Not only can you full-text search your own bookmarks, but you can also full-text search any other Simpy user’s public bookmarks. In my opinion, this is big and useful. Browsing by tags is nice, but is also limiting. Full-text search can do more, and since Simpy supports fielded search, you can always emulate tag search with queries like tags:foo (more info is in the FAQ).

You can see your Tag Cloud now (just use the “tags” link in the nav bar at the top of Simpy pages). A Tag Cloud is a more visual representation of your tags and their usage distribution. Along with the Tag Cloud come the 4 new Tag functions: remove, rename, split, and merge. These 4 functions will let you mess with your tags to your heart’s content. If they are not enough, I’m all ears.”

Release Notes are here.

These are useful additional features. I really like seeing data in a tag cloud format for some reason - I’d love it if the RSS aggregators showed new unread content in this format - it would make it much easier to quickly get to the content I want to read.

I also have to say that I was blown away by the Shadows “Shadow Page” idea - simple yet very, very useful, and I would like to see simpy and others consider this idea.

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  1. Otis

    I signed up for Shadows the other day, but nothing really worked for me :(. What is the “Shadow Page” feature? Does that refer to comments that other users can add to a bookmark?

    As for Simpy’s new features, I think another useful one is the ability to full-text search not only your own bookmarks, but also anyone else’s. For example, if you go to http://www.simpy.com/simpy/User.do?username=otis, you’ll see “Search [otis's Links]” in search form in the nav bar at the top. That gives you more power than simple tag browsing.

  2. Michael Arrington

    Otis, thanks for the clarification. I totally agree that searching the full text of others’ bookmarks is a great feature. Sometimes I forget that the “data” is more important, in the end, than the “meta-data”. Or is it? :-)

  3. Otis

    Data to meta-data: “you complete me”. Terrible, but I couldn’t help myself.