In Depth Product Overview
- SORT
- SKIM
- SHARE
- SAVE (LIBRARY)
- OPML IMPORT
- MUTING CHANNELS/FEEDS
- BUFFER INTEGRATION
- EMAIL DISCOVERY
- CLEAN READING
- TEAMS
- GOOGLE ALERTS
- GOOGLE NEWS
- CSV EXPORT
- ANNOTATIONS AND NOTIFICATIONS
- 1-CLICK ARTICLE SUMMARIES
QUEUING UP CONTENT
Sort
Sort is a unified queue, meaning any team member can actively edit it. If one team member passes an article to Skim or deletes it entirely, it will be removed from other team member’s views.
Easily pass articles to the Skim queue by clicking the ✔ or delete them out of your feed forever by clicking the X.
Once deleted there is no going back.
Skim
Look over the articles you and your teammates have passed from Sort and action them accordingly. You’ll see the same card on the left-hand side and the full content on the right-hand side.
Like in Sort you have the options to pass the article to the next queue, Share, by clicking the ✔ or delete them out of your feed forever by clicking the X. Additionally, there is a new option of the Thumb Tack. Clicking on the Thumb Tack will send the article from Skim to both Share and Library.
As with Sort, any member of your team can action a card at any time. To prevent over-eager movement, you’ll notice a circle with the initials of someone on it if they are currently reading the article.
Share
The Share queue layout is much the same as Skim, the left-hand column is a list of all the articles and the right-hand column is the full text of the articles.
There is an addition of the Buffer button to easily share to multiple social networks at once. You’ll also noticed that we have removed the ✔ as it is no longer needed.
The Share queue is uniquely configured so that if you delete an article via the X it will only delete for you as a single user, it will not delete for your teammates. To save an article for future reference as a team, simply click the Thumb Tack Icon and it will be saved for your entire team.
Save
The Library as it’s called in the platform is where you can save articles that you find to be particularly good or useful to your team. The layout is the same as both Skim and Share, the left-hand column is a list of all the articles and the right-hand column is the full text of the articles.
ADDITIONAL FEATURES
OMPL Import
OMPL (Outline Processor Markup Language) is an XML format for outlines to exchange feeds between readers. If you are using an existing feed reader, you can simply export your OPML document and then import it right into Modacta. No need to re-enter feeds one by one.
There are two ways to get to the import page. If you click on New Channel, you’ll see the ability to import OPML and it will route you to the import page. Additionally, if you click on the Gear icon in the upper right you can find import underneath it.
Just upload your file and click import. The import will take place in the background so it may take a few mins.
Muting Channels/Feeds
One of the toughest challenges of designing for teams out of the box is how to build a platform that is based around effeciency. Not all team memebers will want to see everything, but from time to time they will want to explore what other teams are working on. This is where intelligent muting comes into play.
Muting is done by an individual user and the muting will remain local to that user and will not be applied to other team members. This allows for a fully customized appearence for the individual user.
Muting a Channel or a Feed will remove that Channel and its Feeds or simply the indivdual feed from all of the queues, Sort, Skim, Share, and Library.
This makes it easy to assign Channels or Feeds to individual people and simply unmute the feeds when you are reading from the share and library views.
CHANNELS
Channels can be muted without the need to unsubscribe. Muting a channel will remove the corresponding feeds from all of the queues. Click on the gear box next to the channel name and you’ll find on the top line a mute button, click once and it will mute everything, click again and it will unmute everything. You can also mute individual feeds.
When a channel is muted it will show grey and italicized.
FEEDS
There are two ways to mute individual feeds. The first way is to open the settings on a channel as above and click on the signal icon to toggle the feed on or off. The second way is to simply click on that same signal icon in the menu on the left-hand side.
Once a feed is muted it will become italicized and greyed out.
Buffer Integration
Buffer is an easy to use social media sharing engine that allows you to link up your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest profiles. It allows you to queue up posts in bulk, schedule the posts to repeat mulitple times, and automatically shortens your links so you can track the clicks and engagement per post.
Clicking on the Buffer icon on the share or library views will pop up this popup (ensure that you allow popups from your domain, you’ll then be able to choose what social networks to post to, when, and what to say to your followers.
Users will be able to see what has already been shared as the icon will be a different color, signaling that it is something that other users might also want to share.
Email Discovery
If you’ve ever had to put together an email list of journalists to reach out to, then you know the pain of Google searching, then opening, then reading then finding, then either using a program or manually guessing after going to LinkedIn for an email address.
We do this all automatically for you. If the author of the post writes for the publication selected and it’s available, we’ll search common combinations behind the scenes and if we find a hit, we’ll display the author’s email right next to their name. As seen above. This information is exportable via CSV as well.
Clean Reading
The left-hand menu of sources is great for Sorting and selecting your the feeds you are interested in reading about.
Not so great when you just want to read what you’ve found. We’ve made that menu collapsible for what we call “clean reading”. See what the above layout looks like after it’s collapsed:
See what the above layout looks like after it’s collapsed:
This leaves a clean and uncluttered view making it easy to breeze through articles with greater page real estate.
Teams
The real power of Modacta is the team first approach. As an app designed for teams, most of the features are just more fun when you add people. There is no limit to team size, you can quick invite people by clicking on the person icon with the + sign in the upper right-hand corner.
You can then just send them an invite and track their acceptance right from the dashboard.
Google Alerts
Finally, Google Alerts done right. Enter your alert as a feed and view full content inside Modacta. Better yet, click buffer and it will share the actual URL of the article not the default Google one. Even better, like above, we’ll do an email search on the redirect URL and give you back the email address of the author for the website the article originally appeared.
Google News
Looking for a topic to follow or have a keyword or feel like running a Boolean search, say no more.
As with Google Alerts, we’ll pull the redirect URL so you can view from inside Modacta, no need for a redirect, and of course we’ll grab the email address of the author as well for easy export later via CSV.
Export via CSV
1- click CSV exports including Author’s email addresses. Yup, we made it that easy.
Simply move your articles into Library, specify what feeds you want to see and click the cloud icon next to the search and you’ll have a CSV downloaded with all the visible articles from that queue.
Note: Email address searches will only happen after the article has been sent to the Library.
Annotations and Notifications
When you highlight text and drop in an annotation in the Skim, Share, or Library Queues it will appear on the article and if you @ tagged the “team” or an individual person you’ll they will receive both an email notification and an in app notification. Additionally, if you were the one that tagged them, you’ll receive a notification when they have viewed the article you tagged them in.
1-Click Summaries
Articles are long and increasingly today a lot of them are full of fluff. Unfortunately, that is the way people often write today, however, we’ve found a better way. We’ve got you covered by allowing you to toggle between Full Text and Summaries for articles in Skim, Share, and Library Queues. Making it easy for you to get the gist of what is going on in the article in 25% of the words. This feature will save for the queue you are currently active in until you switch back or click to another queue.