Hi all. I just downloaded Eluma and started messing around with it. Thought I would post a few thoughts that hit me right off the bat.
1. Unless i am missing it, there does not seem to be a way to have multi word tags. I used to be of the mind set that everything could be described using single words, but I really find now that having the ability to include descriptive, multi-word tags is very useful. Can it be done?
When we designed tagging, we looked at different tagging products to see how they deal with this. Some allow multi-words. Some don’t. For a variety of usability reasons, we decided to have spaces be the separator between tags. However, you can use other separators, like an underscore or period to effectively implement multi words. For example, red_sox instead or red.sox. Do you see a big difference between this approach and doing something like only using commas as separators?
2. I don't see a way to search for information that I have captured in Eluma. When I search it seems to search the shared collections online, but not my personal collection. I have not looked real hard, so perhaps I am just over looking it.
You are correct. Our current search is implemented to only search for public items in the Elumaverse on our servers. We have gotten early feedback that people would like to search their local items and we have this feature on our short-term roadmap.
3. The RSS reader is really very basic by today's standards. One thing that I would really like to be able to do is click on the title of a feed, and have it display right in Eluma. I see that I can drag the feed title to my personal collection, and then click the article to read it. But I would really rather read before collecting. The experience seems to be based on using that Eluma application as opposed to the browser, so this seems like an obvious fit.
Yes, we agree. We will be adding other RSS styles to let you choose your favorite way of viewing feeds. Also on our short-term roadmap are extensions to RSS feeds that will let you collect/flag/rate individual feed items without having to use drag&drop.
4. I like the idea of the voting buttons for sites, very Stumbleuponish. I wonder though how, many people need to use the service before you start getting useful information from it? Can I search for the items that people have rated highly? Can I browse the items that have been rated?
For popular items, the number isn’t particularly large before the data gets useful. We don’t have enough data yet to know about the spread and what % of items will have useful ratings.
In the search results window, you can pull down the “advanced” section and narrow search results by ratings over a certain value.
We are implementing a browse feature that will make it easier and more obvious how to peruse collections by rating and category. In the short term, you can use the advanced search functionality to effectively do the same thing.
5. Installation is small, fast, and quite smooth on a Vista machine. Thats a good thing.
Thanks. Our goal is to keep it small and lightweight.