The “SOG” Release

In the “SOG” release, we are introducing the first features that allow FeedLounge to work with other services.

We’ve introduced TagThru™ in this release. TagThru™ takes any item tags you add in FeedLounge and also adds them to your account in a tagging/bookmarking service. In talking with a number of users about this feature, we believe that being able to use the smooth integration of tagging in the FeedLounge interface with the ability for you to also have these tags in your primary tagging/bookmarking service.

The first implementation of TagThru™ is an integration with del.icio.us. If you have a del.icio.us account, you can activate TagThru™ in FeedLounge and whenever you tag an item in FeedLounge, we’ll also add that tag to your del.icio.us account¹.

We plan to add support to other services like furl, Ma.gnolia, Google Bookmarks, Yahoo! MyWeb, etc. in the future. At the moment these services don’t have APIs for us to use, though most of them have announced that they have an API is planned.

As they create their API’s, we strongly encourage these services to have an API that simply allows the adding of a tag/label to an URL with a single API call. For our del.icio.us TagThru™ implementation, we have to first ask for any tags for the item, do our own merge, then update the item. We do this to make sure we don’t stomp any existing tags you may have given the item in del.icio.us prior to tagging the item in FeedLounge. Sure it’s an edge case, but folks generally aren’t very happy when they lose data.

We’ve also added the ability to sort items “oldest first”. Our users told us that this was important to them on the Voting Page (it was #3 on the list today), we’re glad to be able to deliver it to them. One more dot on the TechCrunch chart for FeedLounge.

In addition to the new features, we’ve also expanded our 50 person, 3 Hour Tour to a 500 person, 24 Hour Tour (restarting at midnight PST). Now you can take FeedLounge for a spin for a full day, so you can really get the full FeedLounge experience.

Stephen O’Grady is honored with this release. Steve has been with us since our early alpha days and has generously provided invaluable feedback to us in a number of areas. Thanks Steve, hope you like being able to tag things in del.icio.us right from within FeedLounge!

1. The call to tag in del.icio.us is placed in the Queue, so the tag may be slightly delayed in appearing in del.icio.us depending on the size of the Queue. [back]