We have been listening closely to what all of our great users have been saying and are rolling out our next major version, WebMynd 0.4. The new features include…

1. An iphone fling interface to navigate pages, man is it fun!
2. A simple and powerful organization system that stacks all of your pages from the same website. Combats all the clutter and endless scrolling in the old version.

3. Enhanced Google search that reminds you of pages you have seen before. Great for finding that site you remember seeing but Google isn’t pulling up.

Let us know what you think of the new features. We hope that you enjoy them.

Hello WebMynders, full text search is now working with out slowing down your WebMynd playback. There is a lag of about 5 minutes between when you look at a page and when it gets indexed for full text search, so if you are not seeing recent pages appear when you run a text search that is the reason.

We want to thank the people who took the time to fill out our survey, your feedback and suggestions are extraordinarily valuable in helping us figure out what features to build next. The majority of people requested a tagging system and a way to extract contact information from pages that they see. We are hard at work implementing these features now.

On a separate but related topic I came across an interesting book today that my friend Justin recommended entitled “Keeping Found Things Found: The Study and Practice of Personal Information Management” by William Jones. Dr Jones is a Professor at the Information School, University of Washington. Seeing how relevant this topic is to WebMynd I quickly ordered the book from amazon.com and am awaiting its arrival.

Doing a little more online research about the book I came across some interesting studies that Dr. Jones’s research group had conducted on how people keep track of the websites they visit. I was interested to find out that they identified 13 different methods that people commonly use to keep track of websites, they are (in no particular order)…

Send email to self
Send email to others
Print out the web page
Save the web page as a file
Paste the web address (URL) into a document.
Add a hyperlink to a personal web page
Do nothing to save but search again to re-access
Do nothing to save but enter the URL directly
Make a Bookmark or Favorite
Do nothing to save but access via another web site
Use Personal Information Management Software
Personal Toolbar or Links
Write down the web address (URL) on paper

The study also found that generally people have a repertoire of between five and seven keeping methods from the list above that they use weekly. That is quite a lot of ways to try and keep track of information that comes from a single source, the web. It seems like having website information spread across email accounts, note pads, bookmark folders, etc. is more confusing then helpful. These folks need to give WebMynd a try! Keep all those website in one spot and do a WebMynd search when you need to find it again. Anyway I look forward to reading the book and learning more about keeping found things found, that is certainly something we want WebMynd to help people with.

We want to thank all of our users for their patience as we scale the WebMynd service. Due to the large number of people installing and using the WebMynd addon we have suffered some slowdowns. We realize that WebMynd playback and search have been running slowly but rest assured that we are working around the clock to improve performance.

If you are having problems please post to our forum or email us at support@webmynd.com. We want to make your experience the best it can be. Thanks again for your patience.

We just got added to the official Firefox Addons list (AMO). It took a couple of weeks in the sandbox, where Mozilla pokes your plug in to make sure it works properly, but we are finally on the list. The people at Mozilla are some of the best folks around and we want to thank the editors who took the time to review WebMynd and put it on the public AMO list.

Now that we have the Mozilla seal of approval it means that Firefox beta 3 users will be able to install WebMynd. Starting tomorrow FF3 users can install from WebMynd.com or if you just can’t wait you can get it at the AMO site right away.

Happy surfing.

For those of you who have the latest version of the WebMynd plug in you may have noticed a new pull down menu next to the WebMark star with the word “publish”. So what ever does this magical menu item do? It lets you send pages to the OpenMynd collection for the rest of the community to see.

This public collection is our first step towards letting you share your pages with friends and family even if they don’t have a WebMynd themselves. The pages you choose to publish will be available for everyone to see.

The OpenMynd pages are not the same as the virtual copies that you have in your personal WebMynd. OpenMynd page are a static image of the page as it was when you clicked the publish button. However there will be a link out to the live copy on the web.

We look forward to you populating the OpenMynd with some cool pages. Our hope is that the OpenMynd will grow into an interesting collection of pages that is fun for everyone to flip through.

We would love to hear what you think of the new publish feature.

You may have noticed that there have been some problems with search these past couple of days - the results have been less than perfect as some of you have noticed! We’ve been working around the clock to address them, and will post again when they are resolved along with some technical snippets on where the problems lay for those of you who are interested

Hopefully you are still able to enjoy the rest of your WebMynd experience with full visual playback of your history, WebMarking and full snapshots of pages as you saw them.

Thanks for your patience!

Since launching on Saturday, we have had some great feedback and suggestions on what we could do to make WebMynd better. Thank you! We really appreciate it, and would love to hear more!

Today we released another version of our Firefox extension which includes another performance improvement to make your browsing experience seamless while still recording a great visual history for you to playback. The main features we are focusing on now are around sharing and publishing your web history. We have some great ideas in this area and will be launching some of them within days. Do check back for updates…

Thanks to ouij for his review and for pushing us to support Linux (which we now do). I love this screenshot that he put up on Flickr. You may also have noticed a YouTube post for WebMynd.

Based on inital user feedback on our forum, this blog and TechCrunch we have made a couple of changes to the WebMynd extension for Firefox.

The latest version is 0.2.6 and is available from our homepage. If you’ve already installed the earlier version or trial versions you may be automatically prompted to update it the next time you restart Firefox.

The changes include:

- A bug fix which means we can now support Linux

- A change to the way we take a snapshot of the page which should improve browser performance

There has been some confusion over our charging model and where data is stored so, to reiterate:

- The thumbnails and full images of webpages are stored locally on your hard-drive. The text content is sent up to our servers for indexing so we can offer full text search now and social features in the future. You can ‘playback’ your browse by hitting the WebMynd icon to the right of the URL toolbar. This loads a page from our website to give two playback modes: reeler and grid.

- You will be able to view all browser history and WebMarks (take a WebMark using the star icon next to the url bar) through our interfaces for free. You will be able to search your entire browser history for the last 7 days for free, and your WebMarks indefinitely. However, the index does take up storage space on our servers which is why we offer upgrades if you want to be able to search your whole browser history through our interfaces for longer periods.

Please do keep the feedback coming in and we will respond as quickly as we can. We would love to hear from you.

Here at WebMynd we are taking a new approach to the way you organize what you see on the web. We say don’t organize! Just save everything. When you want to see it again just peek into your WebMynd, what your looking for will be there waiting for you. All of a sudden the internet is an extension of your own memory!

The product and concept have just been covered on TechCrunch, you can read about it here.

We are only at the beginning of what you will be able to do with your WebMynd. Stay tuned for much more to come…

We have just launched a new version (v0.2) of the extension with new buttons and menu options based on your feedback. This one is a candidate for a public beta launch so I would really appreciate your comments and feedback.

Hopefully you will notice plenty of changes for the better in this version as well as in the reeler and grid playback pages.

- Amir