Is Onfolio A Feature Or A Product?
from the my-vote:-feature dept
J.J. Allaire apparently knows how to get publicity. His latest company, Onfolio, launched today, and it's tough to find a tech news publication that isn't covering the story (just ask Google news). So, what does Onfolio do? It appears to be a serious improvement on the way people use "bookmarks" or "favorites" in their browser - letting them more easily stores pages, organize them, take notes on them and share the results. I don't doubt those they've seeded the program to who claim that it's very useful. However, is it actually worth $30? First of all, we've pointed out that many people have completely given up on using their bookmarks/favorites, and it's difficult to convince them to go back. However, even if they did want to go back, why would they want to pay $30 to do so? Especially when there are free services out there like del.icio.us and my new favorite Furl? As far as I can tell, Furl lets you do just about everything Onfolio does with the added benefit of it being able to build on the community aspect of everyone contributing links that others can see. If anything, Onfolio looks to be a feature. If it really started to catch on, why wouldn't Microsoft or the team at Mozilla just build in similar functionality to their browsers?
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No Subject Given by Charles W. on Mar 15th, 2004 @ 10:15am
Well now that a company is selling a product that does it Microsoft won't just add the feature to IE. They will buy the company, and then add in the feature. That way they won't get sued. Maybe thats what Onfolio's owners are hoping for.
Charles W.
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No Subject Given by Chris on Mar 15th, 2004 @ 11:04am
Maybe all the Macromedia stock didn't turn out quite so valuable - so this time the Allaire's are looking to get bought out by MS.
I quit reading the article, err press release, at "Internet Explorer only."
And really, how many people are trying to absorb enough web info to make this valuable? Maybe Scoble and his 1300+ RSS feeds needs it, but normally people probably don't.
It seems like a solution in search of a problem.
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boomarks by Jeremiah on Mar 15th, 2004 @ 12:47pm
Speaking as someone with over 1100 bookmarks in IE, I welcome the idea of a system where i can add contextual information to the bookmarks (including a reminder to look at a page in a week or something). I also like the idea of sharing the bookmarks, although it seems that the common blog is supplanting this function. Again, speaking for myself, I've just started using my blog to share sites i've bookmarked, because I can add more information with the links, and my visitors have an opportunity to check out various online treasures.
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Re: by Marc on Mar 22nd, 2004 @ 6:45pm
Hey Chris - I'm pretty normal(ly) and I'm loving Onfolio. Yes, I only read about 150 RSS feeds each day so I'm not in Scoble's league. But I do have hundreds of bookmarks in at least a hundred folders and finding stuff, organizing stuff, and sharing stuff used to be an exercise in frustration.
Please spare me the anti-IE rant. It's old. I also use Opera, Firefox, Safari, Mozilla, and OmniWeb. Why? Because I care how my company's web site looks to all visitors. And you know what Chris? Every one of these browsers is just as awful as IE at organizing and sharing bookmarks.
Granted, most of them have a tabbed UI ;^)
But if the Allaire boys want to make the dominant browser easier to use, more efficient, and, as a bonus, actually kind of fun... and offer all of that for $30... well that's a bargain.
If you research online as part of your profession like I do, a tool like Onfolio fills a real need.
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Keepoint by nb on May 5th, 2004 @ 5:25pm
I would suggest a better product: Keepoint
It not only lets you save the information, but organizes and retrieves the saved information for you in a very revolutionary manner. other features include, share and annotate web pages.
http://www.keepoint.com/defaulte.asp
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