Late last week we launched Apture 2.0 and the early feedback has been extremely positive.  Users are simply blown away by the way it works, how it is designed and the huge rise in social sharing of their content.

Listed below are 10 of the best features within Apture 2 and why you should sign up.  It’s 100% free and is one line of javascript.  If you do not like to read there is a short video below that walks through most of the features.

1.  Your Brand

In our research we discovered over 70% of visitors scroll 150 pixels down the page within 1 second of visiting a page.  What this means is within one second a great majority of readers have scrolled past your branding and are simply reading the article.  Apture 2.0 recaptures the affinity for your brand by always making it visible while they are reading.

2.  Customization

Apture 2.0 is built from the ground up to be tailored to fit in with your site. You can insert your own logo, change the color of the bar or text.  We went the extra mile and even built in the ability to support high-resolution artwork like transparent png files.

3.  One Click Social Sharing

Constantly bloggers are forced to make decisions about where to place social sharing buttons.  Do you put them at the top or bottom of articles?  With Apture 2.0 you never have to worry because as your reader explores your content they will have the ability to share on Facebook, Twitter or via email whenever they want.  Immediately users are noticing an increase in the number of times their articles are being shared.

4.  No modification to your Site Template

You work hard in developing your site layout; you don’t want to have to move stuff around to make room for new functionality. Apture 2.0 is designed to integrate with nearly every website on the web by giving you full control over when it appears and disappears letting you keep things where they were.

5.  Turn the Copying of Text into Pageviews

Some reports have stated up to 8% of total pageviews result in a user copying text to their clipboard they are reading.  With Apture 2.0 if a user copies text 40 characters or less to their clipboard it immediately performs a search on the terms and brings back results to your reader.  Possibly keeping them on your site and further engaged.

6.  Makes Searching Your Site Easy

In most site templates site owners are forced to put the search box somewhere on the site wether it’s the upper right of the page or in the right gutter.  Apture 2.0 puts the search box in the upper right at all times for your readers meaning additional pageviews are a few keystrokes away.

7.  Bring Wikipedia articles, YouTube videos and Twitter results right to your site

Sometimes you simply cannot provide the answer your reader is looking for.  Using patented technology Apture 2.0 displays to your readers additional content from Wikipedia, Twitter and even YouTube right on your site!  Just because you reader wants to check out Wikipedia or YouTube doesn’t mean they have to leave your site.

8.  Quick Preview

Apture 2.0 brings Google results right to your site, but in a very advanced way.  We call it Quick Preview.  How it works is in Safari and Chrome web browsers Apture 2.0 surfaces results from Google that can be opened up right on your site.  Yes you read that correctly when a user searches inside Apture 2.0 and clicks a Google result it will open up right on your site.  See the screenshot below from ShortFormBlog yet we are viewing the dimensions of the Nexus One from Google’s product page.  Your readers shouldn’t have to leave your site to consume additional content.

9,  Convert Highlighting of Text To Pageviews

Readers often highlight text while they read.  Sometimes it’s out of habit and other times its to copy words to their clipboard for exploration within Search Engines.  If a user highlights text 40 characters or less Apture 2.0 displays a small search button for the reader to quickly explore that topic.

10.  Time on Site

With so much functionality your readers are going to stay on your site longer.  On average every interaction within a search result lead to an increase in time on site of one minute.

Sign Up Today! or if you are a current user of Apture simply drop me an email with the words Upgrade Me and we’ll do the rest.

Over the last few months we have been updating Apture with LinkedIn, Bing and today we are launching Google Search Results within Apture.

1.  Google Image Search

If you look under Images Apture now by default surfaces photos from Google related to your search term.  This has been a major request from users and judging by the feedback on our Fan Page people are excited.

2.  Google Web Search Results

Under the Web Pages tab within Apture now will display results from Google for whatever you are looking for.  It is set by default to display whatever Google deems most relevant.

We hope these additions make finding the content you want for your blog post that much easier.  Drop us a note on our Facebook Page or Twitter if you any questions or concerns.

Happy Blogging.

If you have been following our Twitter account over the last week then you may have noticed we were performing a series of infrastructure upgrades last week to respond to keep up with demand for Apture.

I’m excited to announce now that we’ve completed the massive overhaul of our backend infrastructure that makes Apture not only more stable, but faster as well. We apologize for any slowdowns you may have experienced last week, but a lot of testing was needed to ensure things went smoothly. If you are interested technically in what we did the blog post is here. In the process of examining the code we actually were able to add a few new bells and whistles to Apture.

1. Wikipedia
We did some retooling on the backend and came up with a way to cache all of Wikipedia. What it means to you is when you link to a Wikipedia document it should load nearly instantly. Speed gains on some of the larger articles with this overhaul are near 50x

2. Scribd/PDF Document handling
Over the last few weeks we’ve been talking with many users and noticed they were having trouble with Scribd documents loading slowly or not loading at all. It turns out Scribd had some larger bugs in their API that we helped them fix. 99% of the documents should load properly and a few remaining bugs Scribd promised us they would fix in their next software release. Please let us know if you see any remaining Scribd related issues so we can help track them down.

3. New Animations Results now open in a way that we feel visually communicates what is happening when an Apture link is clicked. We think this will result in users clicking on more of the links you take the time to make. Send us your feedback simply by replying to this email. You can view a brief video of it here .

We appreciate your patience last week and hope you enjoy the improvements we’ve made. As always, if you have any feedback or are having any issues using Apture please feel free to reach out to me so we can look into it right away.

Also we are working on the NEXT version of Apture. Its very different and we’d love to show you an early version of it. Simply send an email to drew @ apture dot com with your site url and we’ll look into getting you set-up.

Andrew Machado
Community Manager
www.facebook.com/apture