Attensa

What a week

Attensa for Outlook .99 is off to a strong start and we're flattered by the great reviews. Take a look.

From Marc Orchant at the Office Weblog
"An incredibly cool idea."

From Rok Hrastnik at the RSS Marketing Diary
"Attensa moves one step closer to RSS aggregators of the future"

From Digital Inspiration
"Attensa could pose a big threat to Newsgator Outlook Edition"

From TechCrunch
"Attensa is aggressively adding features to compete with other readers and has an excellent product suite."

From Scott Quick at All Things RSS
"Looks like the boys at Attensa have been busy indeed.  They just published v0.99 and there are significant improvements over the previous versions." (Disclosure - Scott's an investor and a friend but he knows what he likes)

De-geeking Del.icio.us

Del.icio.us is a great way to keep track of anything that captures your attention on the Web and to share those things with people with similar interests. Del.icio.us tags are simply keywords you add to add context to RSS feeds, articles, Web pages, blog posts, photos, even music you discover online. When you set up your bookmark page on Del.icio.us, not only can you see the pages you’ve you tagged, you can also see related articles from other people who tagged the same pages or used the same tags as you have. Since every Del.icio.us page has an RSS feed you can also subscribe feeds based on a given subject, user, URL, or tag.

You can use tags to organize information you find interesting, but the real magic of Del.icio.us is in its social network. Simply put, Del.icio.us is a powerful tool for sharing your attention. I am frequently surprised with the great material I find by exploring the articles that have captured the attention of other del.icio.us users.

When you find a Del.icio.us user who seems to have a gift for finding great material you can subscribe to a feed and every new article tagged by that user is sent right to folder in Attensa. In searching on attention, attention.xml and AttentionTrust.org I ran across Steve Gilmorr’s bookmarks. Now I’m automatically receiving any post regarding the subject of attention that Steve thinks is worth tagging. It’s better than searching. There is something inherently better about the articles Del.icio.us suggests. It’s a pure crystal attention stream.

OK. I’ll admit it. When I first went to check out Del.icio.us I got a wicked case of MEGO (my eyes glaze over). I couldn’t figure out what was going on until Eric Hayes walked me through it. I don’t think I’m alone in saying Del.icio.us is cryptic. But, once you get the hang of it, Del.icio.us opens up new doors.

We are using Attensa to de-geek the process of adding Del.icio.us tags. You can add tags to articles using a pull down list in Attensa for Outlook and by using the Attensa Toolbar for Internet Explorer. When you tag articles with Attensa your bookmark list on Del.icio.us is updated and synchronized automatically.

Attensa for Outlook .99 - More Del.icio.us, faster and better looking

We’ve just posted the latest version of Attensa for Outlook, version .99.  Download it here.

We’ve integrated an incredibly easy way to tag articles and feeds using the Attensa Toolbar forInternet Explorer. Tags are simply keywords you add to add context to RSS feeds, articles, Web pages, blog posts, photos, even music you discover online.

The new tagging feature can be used in Attensa to keep feeds and articles organized but it also works with Del.icio.us. Del.icio.us is a great way to keep track of anything that captures you attention on the Web and to share those things with people with similar interests. When you set up your bookmark page on Del.icio.us, not only can you see the pages you’ve you tagged, you can also see related articles from other people who tagged the same pages or used the same tags as you have. Since every Del.icio.us page has an RSS feed, you can also subscribe to feeds based on a given subject, user, URL, or tag. It’s a pure attention stream that you can explore.

You can add tags to articles and access them using a pull down list using the Attensa Toolbar for Internet Explorer. When you tag articles with Attensa your bookmark list on Del.icio.us is updated and synchronized automatically. With the addition of tagging, Attensa gives you a set of tools for organizing your feeds and articles. Categories let you create a hierarchal structure using folders to keep feeds organized. Tags give you a more free form tool for keeping articles organized and they connect you with the del.icio.us social network.

Here's a screenshot of the new tagging tool. This is how you add tags:

This is how you can see your tagged items in IE:

Sweeet.

Now you can publish to multiple blogs using TypePad, Blogger and LiveJournal.

We’ve made major changes to the Attensa engine to improve performance and efficiency. We’ve added a throttle to the General Settings that will let you control how much of your CPU processing you are willing to allocate to Attensa when it is updating feeds. You can allocate as little as 10 percent to as much as 60 percent.

We’ve also given you control over how Attensa interacts with Outlook. There’s a throttle control in the Outlook Default settings that you can use to adjust how much of Outlook processing is devoted to importing your feeds into folders versus using processing power for sending and receiving email, creating new email, updating calendars and other typical Outlook activities. Play with the throttle until you find the right balance for your work style. We think you’ll see a big improvement in Outlook responsiveness and stability. For our internal testing we consistently ran with 400 feeds in our test OPML file. Thanks to Marc Orchant and Mike Gunderloy for sending us their OPML files. We also fixed a major memory leak in the Attensa engine.

You’ll also notice we’ve changed our look and feel. Frankly the orange and black was a tad halloweenie and the longer we lived with it the less we liked it. (a definite case of more was less). So here’s a new logo and new look. Hope you find it more pleasant to look at. We do.