BlueOrganizer’s Ten Minutes May 27, 2007

Intro: BlueOrganizer is a browser-based tool for intelligently adding information to what you’re looking at in your web-page. Instead of this information being added “bottom up” by other users via services like del.icio.us, it’s added top down, via BlueOrganizer’s parsers, services and algorithms. The result: contextual links on the fly.

How the company sees it: “BlueOrganizer is the new smart-browsing technology for Firefox. It automatically recognizes things like books, wine, travel destinations and offers contextual shortcuts between your favorite sites.”

Exec Sum: Useful but confusing tool for adding contextual information to your browsing. Only for geeks and people who buy a lot of stuff online.

My tenminut.es: Installation was pretty straightforward, but after that things were less clear. BlueOrganizer is at its most basic a button on your browser toolbar that changes color when you visit a website it has information on. Even if it doesn’t you can still access further links by either right-clicking on the page or the pull-down menu next to your address bar:

Visit a web page like Amazon, or anything that sells stuff like wine, music, books, videos etc, and you should find links to relevant sites, along with pre-prepared searches on del.icio.us, Google etc. Select a word, right click on it and the BlueOrganizer contextual menu will offer up a smorgasbord of relevant searches. (There are other features that BlueOrganizer offers but that would have taken me way beyond the ten minutes to figure out.)

Gripes: It felt slow and sluggish on my computer. Thumbnails of websites were slow to generate (they’re still generating.) And the way BlueOrganizer adds itself at the top of my pop-up menu meant I found myself having to wait until its submenu had loaded before I could do anything:

More importantly, I found myself not really getting it. I had to go some way beyond my ten minutes to figure out what it was about; I was surprised it was less intuitive and, frankly, mind-blowing, than I expected, given I’m an admirer of Alex Iskold’s ideas. The help pages weren’t particularly helpful either: I quickly found myself on a “page not found.” Even the example given in the tutorial, the Amazon page on the Nintendo Wii, didn’t always do as advertised, instead throwing up an empty submenu.

Verdict: Nice idea, and popular among the Web 2.0 crowd for bringing the Semantic Web a step closer. Needs a bit of work both on the usability and on the range of stuff it has information on and, ironically, more contextual help to bring it out of the techie ghetto. BlueOrganizer, for all the vision of its creator and its promise, needs to find a way of conveying its usefulnes to ordinary Joes in less time.

Score: 5 out of 10