We spent two days last week doing planning and wanted to share with you our plans over the next few posts. The things we planned include both short and long term product work including SmartLinks enhancements, configurable/viral widgets, the new Indigo release of the BlueOrganizer and social release that we are internally calling BlueCircle. Needless to say we are super excited about getting to all these great ideas, but we are still fixing Denim bugs and are being disciplined about planning and execution.
So the next big thing that we are starting to work on is the SmartLinks WebService and ability to created Automatic SmartLinks on your blog. The use case for this is simple - people want to be able to just put a single piece of JavaScript in their blog header and automatically turn any object link into a SmartLinks. For example, any Amazon link to a book would become a SmartLink, any link to Netflix movie would be come a SmartLink and so on.
To power these new SmartLinks we are creating a Web Service that takes a URL and outputs a BlueMark. We need to do that because the users will no longer be explicitly making the SmartLinks in the BlueOrganizer. Instead, these links will be created automatically, using the SmartLinks Web Service. Here is the schematic of how it will work:
So the upside is that you will never have to think about these SmartLinks, just use the regular links to sites that BlueOrganizer supports. The downside is that you will not be able to manage these SmartLinks. In fact, they will not be yours, but instead they will be shared. For example, if a user links to this Harry Potter book and then you link to it as well, both of you are going to get exactly the same automated BlueMark. You will not be able to add your rating or description or make any other customizations. But again, the upside is that you will not need to BlueMark things manually.
We will keep you posted on how this is coming along. Please drop us email if you would like to beta test this feature.
- Alex
