DEMO’s ringmaster, Chris Shipley, likes to organize related products into clusters of two or three. That makes it easy for people who are interested in a particular technology or type of product to arrange their schedules. It also turns some sessions into mini-shootouts.
That’s what happened yesterday when Pluck and Onfolio had back-to-back slots on the schedule. On the surface, both are fairly similar products that create custom Explorer bars for reading RSS feeds and saving snippets of a Web page. I’m intensely interested in this type of product, because this is what I do all the time. If I can find a single product that can help me keep track of bits of useful information, I’ll be a happy camper.
Last year, I tried early versions of both products and quickly determined that neither one would work for me. At DEMO, both companies were announcing new versions (Onfolio is still in a preview release), so I decided to take a closer look. In a nutshell, I’m drawn to Onfolio and not immediately impressed by Pluck.
Pluck feels like a simple feed reader and search tool that has a few research functions grafted on. It does a good job of helping me put together canned searches (what it calls Perches) on eBay and Amazon, and it does a pretty good job of helping me find feeds. I had to use the online help to figure out how to import my feeds into Pluck. When I found a page I wanted to save, I “plucked” it and Pluck saved a 50–word excerpt from the beginning of the page (or from the text I had selected) along with a link to the entire page. To see more, I had to visit the original page. I could right-click on a saved item and change the name or description, but that’s it. In essence, this is a fairly slick bookmark manager.
By contrast, Onfolio feels like a research tool that has RSS functions tightly integrated into it. I can right-click on a Web page or a feed item, and I get the option to save the selected text, image, or entire page – or for that matter, the entire site – to what Onfolio calls a collection. When I save a snippet, it appears in a dialog box where I can add my own notes about why I saved it. Feeds and saved snippets appear in an elegant newspaper view that I can sort, filter, and customize. I can export the saved snippets to an XML file, to my blog, or to any application. Onfolio looks slicker than Pluck, too, probably because it’s built using the .NET Framework.
I’ll keep evaluating both products for a few weeks, but I have much higher hopes for Onfolio.
Ed Bott 