Qitera is a social bookmarking and page-saving tool that helps members organize and share information. In addition to making bookmark-sharing easy, the site stores copies of pages, allowing retreival even when the original page is no longer online. It is offered as a free service for individuals and will be provided for a fee to business clients with multiple accounts in 2009.

The Qitera gallery, which is reminiscent of Apple’s iTunes application cover flow display, lets you thumb through bookmarked pages and, return a saved copy of the content for reading, printing or sharing with another Qitera user. A list view is also available if you prefer a more traditional approach to saved pages. Sharing, adding more notes and deleting saved pages is straightforward.

The site also emphasizes members’ ability to explore and share information. Once you have friends or colleagues on the site, their saved bookmarks are available for browsing by topic or member name, if they have given permission. 

You’ll want to install the Qitera browser button, which, when clicked, automatically saves the current page to the Qitera service. When saving a page, Qitera opens a window that provides access to existing topic categories, which are effectively the same as tags used on other bookmarking sites to organize information, as well as add coments about the page for future use. Multiple categories can be appended to the saved page. 

The site is a bit complicated, which is not a barrier to getting a lot of value out of the service and to be expected at this early stage. For example, in addition to “categories,” there are “topics” that members can create. These are intended to provide storage for specific collections of documents; the two terms, however, are very closely related, which makes them appear redundant. Also, the placement of options for adding new items, at the top if the list view of saved pages, initially gives the impression, at least to this writer, that saved pages could be annotated with additional saved pages.

Likewise, until members find people with whom to share bookmarks, much of the site’s power is hidden. It’s a new service, so I was not able to find anyone I knew when searching by name. We always suggest inviting people selectively rather than uploading your email contacts en masse.

The group features are less prominent for free accounts because the service is designed for corporate, or “enterprise,” use. In sharp contrast to many social sites, Qitera definitely wants to make money, and soon. They must be careful not to limit individual users as they build their corporate business. 

Companies will be able to purchase accounts that allow teams to share bookmarks and saved content beginning in March 2009. 

Home Page: Qitera.com
A social bookmarking and content repository for individual and enterprise members

Free and Fee

Tags: enterprise, file-sharing, friend lists, social bookmarking

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 27th, 2009 at 10:38 pm and is filed under Social Site Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.