Onfolio listens!

Earlier in the week, I mentioned “my frustration”:http://www.geekfun.com/archives/000483.html with the way Onfolio deals with blogging snippets of text captured from web pages.

Onfolio is like a really smart bookmarking tool (among other things). It goes beyond regular bookmarks by letting you write a short summary of the link and it will index the content of the linked page for its search function. Even better, it lets you capture snippets of text along with the link, or even a local copy of the web page.

Their “new beta”:http://beta.onfolio.com also provides a number of mechanisms for sharing your collections of links, comments, snippets and web pages, including the ability to automatically blog items. In some cases (items captured from RSS feeds), the post contains both your comment and a blockquoting of the captured text. For some odd reason though, when it automatically blogs a snippet, it only posts a link and your comment. The snippet that you so deliberately selected to illustrate the relevance of the link isn’t used.

I’d offered construtive criticism about this in their forum, and they’d noted it, but said they weren’t going to change the behavior before the product left beta. I guess my “persuasive reasoning”:http://www.onfolio.com/support/forums/messageview.cfm?catid=10&threadid=628 finally sunk in though, because they just added “a comment”:http://www.geekfun.com/mt/mt-comments.cgi?entry_id=483 to my “earlier post”:http://www.geekfun.com/archives/000483.html letting me (and my vast and influential readership) know they were changing the behavior.

It’s risky changing a spec so close to shipping, even if its a small change like this one, but I think this was the right thing to do. In doing so, they remove a barrier to Onfolio’s blogging functionality reaching its full potential.