Print Screens Without the Paper: Iterasi

Iterasi is a new company launching its service at DEMO today. The product of serial entrepreneur Pete Grillo, who sold his previous company WeSync to Palm in 2000, Iterasi is another way to organize your web. While the premise of the service is very straightforward, Iterasi pulls from so many schemas that we already have applied to the organization of the web that I’m having trouble figuring out the best way to describe how it all works in comparison to what we already have. But here goes:

Iterasi is a bookmarking tool that lets you take a snapshot of a website in its native format. That means that whether the site is dynamic or static, these web pages can be bookmarked, saved, searched, retrieved, shared, and tagged. This is handy for saving online receipts, submission/application forms, content and images, to name a few. Think of it as a web-based print screen function  without the paper.

As with other bookmarking tools, Iterasi comes complete with a browser bookmark so you can amass websites as you surf the web. Similar to StumbleUpon, Iterasi will let you “notarize” your saved site, adding in tags, showing tags that others have applied to the same site, and providing your own title. These saved items will display in your Iterasi account as thumbnail images, similar to JigJak or Hyperigo.

But if Iterasi is anything like a bookmarking site, it’s main point of differentiation is the personalized ways in which you can organize all your bookmarks. Think of a glorified version of the browser sidebar that lets you place all your bookmarks into various folders. There’s also an option to set a timer for notarizing a webpage at a specified time. If you do this regularly, then you’ve got a time-lapsed glimpse at how a website changes over time, kinda like archive.org.

Now that we’ve taken a look at Iterasi’s main features and likened it to pieces of several existing tools out there, what can Iterasi be used for?

The searchability of Iterasi is very key to the overall value of this service, as this enables users to truly create their own web. Should this data be gathered as an aggregated look at web behavior, multiple things can be inferred, from shopping habits to new perspectives on web search, or a combination of several of these things. It could also be used in conjunction with other tools out there like Shoeboxed that collect your receipts to help you with your own budgeting.

Given the outlook for personalized web experiences, data portability, and a number of other customized tools for mashing up varied parts of your own Internet, Iterasi offers a compellingly simple look at the potential for the tailored web. Is this a better way to handle personal bookmarks than Clipmarks‘ social attempt at sharing items?

[Source: Mashable.com]