You have arrived at the web home of Noah Brier. This is mostly an archive of over a decade of blogging and other writing. You can read more about me or get in touch. If you want more recent writing of mine, most of that is at my BrXnd marketing x AI newsletter and Why Is This Interesting?, a daily email for the intellectually omnivorous.
Filangy is an intelligent search tool integrated with a search engine to make searching productive. We offer features that allow users to personalize their search experience. Two of the features that we have launched in our beta products are WebMarks and WebCache. Over the coming months we will be integrating numerous other helpful features. To get more information about our products and services please see the keep me posted section.Anyhow, today I got an email from them thanking me for using it (it's still in beta) and telling me they had some exciting features coming up. The end of the email asked people to submit any thoughts they had. Of course, when I get an invitation like that I can't refuse, so I mentioned the one big thing I had thought of: a web highlighter. You see, the Filangy toolbar already has this highlighter icon, but it only highlights terms on a page you're looking at. I want something that allows me to highlight and save specific words from a page.
About five minutes after sending my email I got a response . . . from a real person. Imagine that! She agreed that would be a great feature and we emailed back and forth a few times. In an email she mentioned that I should blog that I had spoken to a real person (which I am right now, I guess). In response to that email I wrote her this (keep in mind I'm still kind of reeling from today's big entry):
Hi,About five minutes later I got another response telling me she had forwarded my email on to the CEO and thanking me for sharing my thoughts. "And thanks for taking the time to send us your thought. It's appreciated and welcomed," was exactly what she wrote.
You know, to be completely honest I've been thinking about writing about Filangy on my blog for a while but I'm having trouble defining just what it is. I know that it caches everything I look at (right?) and allows me to bookmark things and then stores it all in a web-accessible database. But what really makes it different than other tools out there? Essentially you're creating your individual search engine, right? It's kind of like an online version of Google Desktop. But why doesn't it have some of the tools that make sites like del.icio.us and Flickr so powerful, specifically tags? I love the idea of Filangy, but I feel as though del.icio.us is a superior system for bookmarking things at the moment. It allows me to annotate my bookmarks (with the "summary" section) and then tag it appropriately. While the highlighter tool would be a huge advantage, there's still something missing in my mind (although I'm not sure what).I actually just wrote about brain function and information architecture and I think there might be pieces of it for you guys to think about: https://www.noahbrier.com/archives/2005/03/i_used_to_think_1.html
Essentially I want software that not only complements my brain, but gives me a better understanding of how it functions. I think this is what separates regular software from the revolutionary stuff.
Can you guys help?
Thanks a bunch and sorry for burdening you with all my thoughts,
NoahPS - This will be going on my blog
You know what? When a company has customer service like Filangy, it makes me believe they'll be revolutionary. They've earned a customer.