blueorganizer - maybe the best Firefox extension yet

Following my post last week about 13 Great Firefox Extensions, I received an email from Alex Iskold, the CEO and founder of adaptiveblue, a company that makes the blueorganizer Firefox extension. Alex had read my article and thought I might be interested in his extension. Not knowing what to expect, I clicked through to the adaptiveblue site and watched the tutorial for blueorganizer and I was absolutely floored at how cool it is.

According to their site, with blueorganizer:

your browser becomes smarter. It helps you personalize your web experience based on what you already like. It harnesses your information to help you discover relevant new information and save time.

Sounds great, but what exactly does that mean? A picture really does say a thousand words in this case so watching the video demo will really help, but I'll do my best to try to explain. blueorganizer is like digg, del.icio.us, stumbledupon, and every other social bookmarking site rolled into one and advanced about five years (I realize that's a pretty bold statement).

Whenever you visit a site with something you would bookmark (say a book, movie, or video game), blueorganizer lets you bookmark the product in its appropriate category. Even cooler, blueorganizer automatically detects products on a page you visit. For example, if you stumble upon (no pun intended) a book on Amazon that you want to save, all that you have to do is click the "bluemark this page" button at the top of the page and bluemark takes care of the rest. It adds a photo of the book, title, author, and relevant tags to the book section of your blueorganizer. Now fast-forward a month to when you want to find that book again - all you need to do is look under your book collection to find your book. No more looking through bookmarks of URL's. You actually look through the products you like, not the sites.

In addition, there are a plethora of features (more than I can mention) that make this extension one of the coolest tools ever. My favorite feature is the ability to publish your bookmarks to RSS so that friends and family can subscribe to them. There are also cool features that allow you to rent movies from NetFlix or compare prices on your product from a bunch of different sites.

I also took some time to read Alex's article entitled "Smart Browser, Where Art Thou?" in which he outlines the reasoning behind creating such an extension:

Bookmarks are flat, the world is not
Let's start by looking at the way we currently remember things on the web. When we find something interesting we create a bookmark. If we are web 2.0 savvy we tag it and send it to del.icio.us. Sounds good, right? Not really. Say we find an interesting book on Amazon, a wine to buy for a friend's birthday, or a restaurant that we'd like to visit next Valentines day. The moment we bookmark the site, the rich concept like a book, a wine or a restaurant instantly disappears. Instead what we have left is the link: a piece of text that will not be meaningful a week from now. Why not? Because we do not think in terms of links. We think in terms of concepts like books, wines and restaurants.

After reading that, I'm even MORE convinced that blueorganizer is absolutely ingenious. Very, very innovative stuff.