Good news! Fleck has been awarded with the 100% CLEAN Award by SoftPedia. This means that actual people at SoftPedia have downloaded, installed and checked our software and made sure that it contains no malware, virusses or other malicious code.

If you didn’t trust us before this might be just what you were waiting for!

We just received a large stack of paper from the ‘International Searching Authority’ regarding a patent we filed in 2005 for certain parts of Fleck.com. It was published online on May 7, 2007 and can be found here:

(WO/2007/042076)

The title (how poetic!) is

“A COMPUTER PROGRAM AND SYSTEM FOR NAVIGATING THROUGH ELECTRONIC DOCUMENTS”

Patrick and me are listed as both as ‘Applicants’ and ‘Inventors’ which made us very proud when we first got the papers back. Now that it is online it is even more interesting! I wonder if it will affect my Google Rank.

As far as the value of a patent and my opinion on patents in general, that is another story.

We have been working on a new version of the Fleck Add-on for a while now. Before we could launch it we had to make some changes to the server side technology so that is why it took a while.

The new version not only works better then the old version. It is also the start of a new direction and function of Fleck. Right from the early days we wanted Fleck to become a new layer on the web which you could access always and everywhere. For that dream to become reality we needed more than just the technology to add notes to websites. We also need a way to signal people that there are actual Flecks on the page they are visiting.

The new Firefox Add-on does just that. It adds a small Fleck logo to your browser that displays the number of Flecks on any page you visit. We hope it will be a small and unobtrusive way to get you attention if there is something there which might be interesting for you.

As you can see in the illustration there are 3 different annotated versions of my Blog.

When you click the little icon a sidebar will open up showing you links and a preview to these annotated pages. At this moment we only show Flecked pages from registered Fleck member and only on that particular URL.

In the future we will add more information here such as Annotated pages from your friends and the number of Flecks on other pages in this domain.

We haven’t officially released the Add-on yet but I would like to ask a few of you to download it and give us some feedback. We are very interested how it works for you before we launch it to everyone.

Download the beta Fleck Add-On here.

We are considering to build some of the Fleck functionality in Flash. One of the reasons is that some content
on webpages floats above HTML and hides our notes and toolbar. Flash might be a solution.

The reason why we haven’t done this earlier is because I figured that not everybody uses Flash and the solution would be worse than the problem. But a few weeks ago someone pointed out to me that over 95% of the internet population now has some version of Flash installed.

I had to look that up at the Macromedia website becuase I just couldn’t believe it. But here it is: “Flash content reaches 98% of Internet viewers“.

According to Macromedia it is even 98.3% of all internet users.

That is why we are now looking into Flash as an alternative technology for our interface. If you know someone who would like to work on this with us, preferably in Amsterdam, then contact us.

You can download the new Fleck Firefox add-on from Mozilla now. We have made a few minor improvements to the code and one visually important improvement.

As you can see in the illustration here the Fleck Button grays out on pages that Fleck isn’t compatible with. For security reasons it just isn’t possible to Fleck pages on secure servers.

So when a URL starts with ‘https’ the button becomes inactive.

At this moment we are working on the 1.0 version of the Fleck Add-on which will introduce a few very cool new features. Until then, enjoy this new version!

If you have Fleck installed in Firefox just select ‘Add-ons’ in the ‘Tools’ menu and click the ‘Find updates’ button in the lower left corner. Fleck will automatically update itself.

Download Fleck Add-on for Firefox:
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/3908/

It seems that the Fleck Webwidget (available here) is getting more and more popular on blogs. In the last 12 hours alone we had 233.000 hits on the Webwidget server! Not bad at all.

If you have the widget on your blog please let us know in the comments here….