Their reason for building LooseLeaves was to provide a simple tool for sharing thoughts and things online when people don't have a blog or when social networks like Facebook don't exactly align with what you are trying to accomplish. This tool allows you create content then share it in a manner that suits your needs. As seen in the below screenshots it is simple to compose your leaf, then save it. Once it is saved you are provided with a public link to share it as well as a unique private management URL that allows you to edit your leaf. Since there are no accounts you have anonymity, so be sure to save that management link someplace safe or it will be lost forever.
The possibilities are endless! Here is the first one I created while testing some of the functionality. I even used the website to create the list of the projects linked to above that bluejava works on. The list could have been added to this blog post, but they didn't exactly relate so it was better and cleaner to make the list elsewhere and link to it. Because of the anonymousness this service can appeal to certain people or organizations much like Pastebin has. Another use case is to provide the link in a tweet when you wish to provide more content. The only change I would like to see is to have a shorter public URL; maybe use ll.me and/or use less text after the "/".
What does the future hold for LooseLeaves? Glenn tells me that the site and product are essentially complete so they will monitor it to ensure the site continues to perform well and isn't abused. Some possible enhancements being looked at are to have a commenting section on the bottom of each leaf page and a tweet stream search within the sidebar. Integration with their Twitter client, T4BP, is likely for when tweets exceed 140 characters and lastly an API may be created.
This is a great service with a nice design. How will you use it?
Wow, very cool. Clean sites like this almost seem fewer and fewer these days. Thanks for the introduction!
ReplyDeleteHi Dain,
ReplyDeleteGlenn here. Thanks so much for this fantastic and kind review of our site Loose Leaves!
I hope your readers will find it useful - and I will take your suggestions to heart! In fact, a small tidbit exclusively for your readers: the URLs only need the "leaf code" (up to the 2nd / ) - not the rest of it, so you can make them much smaller. But I like your ll.me idea even better!
Thanks again - much appreciated!