New Utopic launched: visual bookmarking meets content discovery

Over the last months the Utopic team has been hard at work on a new shiny version that we launched today. Based on your feedback we now mix visual bookmarking with social content discovery. 

With one click you can now save, tag, share and later quickly recover anything on the internet that you find interesting. The same goes for your favourites and links already shared on social networks. Utopic allows you to automatically import and publish those links in a beautiful visual profile. Topic-based content discovery through other people sharing your interests is still there as well, albeit with a new design and navigation.

Utopic now focuses on 3 key features:

1. One-click bookmarking. You get browser extensions to quickly save any web page to Utopic with just one click. All your links are automatically tagged (manual editing is super-easy!) with keywords to categorize and find them fast later.

2. Discovering hot topics. See what your friends and influencers share and like either in Utopic or in external sites, organized by tags. To get more interesting content, just follow people sharing your interests. (We will suggest you users who you might want to follow.)

3. Aggregating links and favorites to your public profile. Your Utopic profile now automatically collects and publishes all the links you’ve shared or favourited on Twitter, Facebook, Youtube and Google Reader (with more to come). All the links you have saved in Utopic are there as well. Your Utopic profile of shared items is a great way to present yourself as a person. So go and promote it to your friends and others.

Save. Share. Discover. This is what new Utopic is about. For some background reading, here is our blog post describing the changes from a few weeks back.

Please go to http://utopic.me/ now (you can get the browser extensions after logging in), check out the new Utopic and give us some feedback on your first impressions, either here or via e-mail to hello@utopic.me. We are glad to have you using Utopic.

By JK Oct 05 in Utopic | Tagged , , | Comments (6)

Utopic: change is in the air

During coming weeks you’ll see a lot change at Utopic. Here’s heads up on what to expect.

Based on our users feedback, first there’s going to be easy bookmarking and later quick searching and browsing of saved items from you, your friends and people sharing your interests. The other new side is aggregation of all of your shared links and favorites from other sites to your Utopic profile. In addition the whole site will get a shiny new design, better navigation and easy to use content discovery.

Social visual bookmarking

The main new focus area is social bookmarking and visual link sharing. Many people have told us they are unhappy with current browser bookmarking and existing social bookmarking services.

Utopic will be the best place to collect and visually share all your bookmarks, links and favorites. We’ll provide easy one-click bookmarking and keyword auto-tagging of anything you find on the web. Be it any article, blog post, news item, music video or photo, a click on our bookmarklet or browser extension will save it to your Utopic profile and share it in your friends Utopic homepage feeds.

You’ll also be able to import your existing browser bookmarks or external services like Delicious, Instapaper or ReadItLater. We really want Utopic to be the best social bookmarking service out there. Let us know, what your biggest gripes with current bookmarking and sharing is and we’ll try to come up with a solution.

External shared links and favorites aggregation

Most of us already share or favorite links on Twitter and Facebook, like items in Google Reader or add stuff to our Youtube favorites playlists. Soon all of those shared and liked items will be automatically shown on your Utopic profile. We like to say: “You are what you share and like.”

We’ll group all objects by automatic keyword tags, so looking at someone’s profile you’ll see at a glance what the person is about. Everything on a profile will be also broken up by content types: links, videos, photos, music and so on. We’ll add many other external services in the future, basically everything where you either add, share or favorite something. Think Google+, Soundcloud, Flickr and many others.

New design and better navigation

Many of the features you currently use at Utopic are not going anywhere, but they’ll get a new design and easy to use navigation.

Our homepage will get better grouping of content from your friends, people you follow and your interest keywords. We’ll break everything into groups by keyword tags or by content types. At any moment it will be easy to read just about technology or about funny jokes, watch just videos or listen to music.

Utopic content discovery is not going to disappear. We will be giving more importance though to content from people you consider important or influencing on any topic. Thought leaders of specific areas will be presented much better as featured users to follow.

Expect these changes to go live in a few weeks. Hope you are as excited as our team. As always, feel free to share your thoughts here or via e-mail to hello@utopic.me.

By JK Sep 01 in Utopic | Tagged , , | Comments (2)

See what’s popular among friends: Utopic.me preview

Ever wondered, what’s popular among your friends right now? Which links are they sharing and reading? Which music listening to? What events are being attended? Even the simplest question – what movies your friends watch and like – has not had a good online solution.

We’ve now launched an early pre-beta preview of Utopic.me: a new service to see the hottest topics among your friends. You can browse the most popular links, videos, music, movies & events, shared and liked by your friends. You’ll get a personalized real-time view of what’s trending today among people who matter to you the most. Kudos to my exceptional team: frontend guy Veli and backend guy Janek, who made all this magic happen!

Please test Utopic out and give some feedback, what you liked and what not, what should be added or changed. Feel free to also like us on Facebook or follow on Twitter.

Some of the problems we try to solve:

  • Have one service to unite everything popular amond your social network, not having to go to ten separate vertical websites.
  • Group popular items shared by your friends by object categories, be it videos, music, events or movies (others to be added later). We believe there’s currently no good services to see that kind of distribution. Head to Utopic sub-pages to see that in action.
  • See only the popular stuff that people interact with daily or weekly. Services like Twitter and Facebook are oveloaded with postings and many of us don’t really have time to go them through.
  • Make people tell their friends more, what do they actually like. Still we try to keep manual action to a minimum (see the end of this post).
  • Have a beautiful user interface with large photos, not just silly small thumbnails. You’ll be amazed how much visual content you currently miss even in your Facebook newsfeed.
  • Be usable across platforms: you can already use Utopic on iPad, Iphone and other mobile platforms just by going to utopic.me. Hopefully we’ll have faster native apps in the future as well.

Utopic is still a baby, so you’ll see a lot of things added over the coming weeks. Everything is not perfect yet, be it the popularity algorithms or general functionality (or the speed of IE, grr). Many things are still on todo list. For now, take it as it is, really a preview of things to come.

Currently we work mostly with Facebook data about you and your friends, but other data sources like Twitter, Youtube etc will be added soon. The goal is to have a quick view of popular topics among your friends across different websites. The preview might be Facebook newsfeed centric (although we process more than that, for example the likes, events & photos of your friends), but as we add more external interfaces, this will be changing.

Back in January 2010 I wrote about issues online I would like to be solved, first one of them being:

“Automatically collected structured recommendations and top lists from friends. How often have you wished to know, what your friends read, listen to, watch? Until we have to manually rate or like stuff, it will not work. More data must be collected and processed automatically, transparently.”

Year later, I still stand by that and would love to see the problem solved, with as little additional workload put on users. It’s so easy to say people have to share & vote, but who likes that? Utopic is one try to do that as smoothly as possible.

Now head to Utopic.me and tell me what you think. Any questions?

By admin Mar 03 in Utopic | Tagged , | Comments (0)