Free Online Research Tool from iCyte Adds Support for RSS Feeds, Blogs, and More
New features enable real-time capture, management, and extended sharing of Web content.
New York-based iCyte, which provides a free online collaborative research tool, has added support for RSS feeds, social media and bookmarking sites, blogs, and wikis. Users can save, tag, annotate, and manage any Web content, share it via their own blog or wiki, and get real-time RSS feeds of publicly shared content using the new tool.
Additional new features include support for a broader range of popular Web browsers, such as Internet Explorer 7 and 8 and Mozilla Firefox 3.0 and above on the PC, Mac, and Linux. An API (Application Programming Interface) has also been introduced that enables developers to build their own customized iCyte portals.
“The Web offers a wealth of information, but it’s also a dynamic medium–Web pages are added and deleted and content is constantly changing, so when you find useful information, you want to capture it right then, while it’s available,” says iCyte co-founder Stephen Foley. “Bookmarking a page doesn’t guarantee that the page will still be there when you revisit, or that its content will be the same. With iCyte, you never need to lose useful content again.”
iCyte is a free downloadable browser add-on that allows users to highlight content on any Web page (text, pictures, articles, or even the entire Web page), save the highlighted portion as a “cyte,” annotate the saved content, add relevant tags, organize saved cytes into projects or logical groupings, and share them with others.
The RSS feed capabilities, social media integration, and widgets for blogs and wikis expand iCyte’s collaboration and sharing capabilities, giving users even more control and real time access to captured information.
About iCyte’s Feature Enhancements
RSS support allows users to receive real-time feeds of cytes added to any public iCyte project. This lets them track new additions to shared projects and follow the latest crowd-sourced research on relevant subjects from any of the thousands of public projects at iCyte. RSS feeds alert users to new information as it’s created. Because iCyte stores all of the saved cytes, the user can preview it via the feed, but then choose to retrieve it later whenever he or she is ready to use it.
iCyte now integrates with social media and bookmarking sites, including Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Digg, Technorati, and Stumbleupon. This new integration features enables users to share a cyte or an entire project via any one of these social networks, giving friends and followers instant access to their saved Web content.
iCyte widgets are designed to make it easy to share capabilities with a broader audience. Knowledge Management systems can now link back to saved Web pages, and students can include research findings within their own personal or group wiki projects.
The API gives developers direct access to design and build iCyte portals that can display cytes and shared projects. These portals can be customized to meet the needs and requirements of different groups and user communities.
iCyte †is available now for download at www.icyte.com.
