Download Squad

There are many applications that allow you to snap snippets of text from web sites and mark, tag, and otherwise share them. It's not a new concept, and truth be told, I wasn't expecting to be too terribly impressed with Deepmemo.com. Their site seemed visually messy, and the mixture of Cyrillic and Roman character sets in the tag cloud area had me concerned, because it didn't seem to change when I selected my language.

The application and delivery of this service, though? Nicely done, guys. You changed my pig-headed mind.

So why does Deepmemo (DM) stand out from the pack? There are a few reasons. The DM toolbar can be used with Firefox, but...hold on to your hats... there is an IE7 version. I know more than a few developers who have no bones saying they'd love to port their add-ons to IE, but it ain't easy. This could be a huge advantage for the DM crew.

It also allows for logins with OpenID, Facebook, or any registered user name associated with a Google service. The caveat is that dm is a third-party application, and it asks for access to your Google (or Facebook) account. If that makes you uncomfortable, it is also possible to just register with dm directly.

What appeals to me most, though, was that DM just stayed out of my way till I wanted to use it. The toolbar is laid out simply, the icons and tooltips are self-explanatory, and logging in and out via the toolbar is easy. The only odd thing is that when a clip is selected to save, the "DM" logo button (which takes you to your page of snippets) becomes an animated, pulsating circle, and it stays that way. It makes it seem as though dm is still trying to save the snippet (and that's not the case). It's more of an alert, it seems, to show you've added new content.

I can share my snippets with the world at large, or just my close inner circle. Or I can be completely antisocial and keep 'em all to myself. If I had a Blogger or Blogspot account, I could blog my quotes (and associated information) directly from DM.

The Deepmemo crew is headed off to Seedcamp London to show their stuff. Between the IE7 add-on, and the Firefox add-on having no issues with installation on Linux or Windows, and a really nicely executed (if cosmetically challenged) service, it seems they have a good shot at really standing out.