Digital Scientists, an Atlanta marketing company, has used Assembla to design some interesting marketing software.

Digital Scientists hosts its code on Git repositories, with tickets and other Assembla collaboration tools to manage development. Digital Scientist Viswanath "Vishi" Gondi (employees are "scientists"; founder Tom Klein is the "chief scientist") says he loves being able to manage tickets using Git commits. That and other features, like our new Ajax menu, attract the scientists to Assembla ticketing over other issue management systems they've tried.

"Everyone prefers to use the Assembla tickets," says Vishi.

So what great stuff are they building with Assembla tools and tickets?

Their Lizzer tool embeds content into emails and blogs. The company wrote it for use on their own blog - feed growth!, which profiles a new marketing tool every day - and they've now converted it to a bookmarklet anyone can add. Lizzer appears as a pop-out box in your browser window. Enter search criteria, and Lizzer uses services such as Google, Photobucket and YouTube to find news, images and video you can link to or embed into what you're writing. The program inserts the elements without your needing enter html embedding code. Lizzer works on email clients like Gmail and Yahoo mail, blogs like Tumblr and Blogger, and even Twitter, sort of - its embeds links, after first making them tiny urls. 

Their WordPress plugin lets blogs' readers paste comments directly on to pictures. Flickr has this feature, but WordPress without the plug-in does not. Digital Scientists use the plug-in for their blog's caption contest. 

The third tool I'd like to mention was released last month. The DS Analytics Tool adds a lot of features that people miss with Google Analytics, such as tracking clicks on external links and tracking file downloads. One feature though stands out. The tool figures out which social networking sites a website's users access. It doesn't use cookies - it just uses the browser's viewing history. Browsers display links they've viewed and links they've not in different colors, so the analytics tool can place links to various sites in an (invisible) inline frame and check their colors to determine if the user has visited them.

This arguable weakness in the way browsers work raises some privacy concerns, but sites that exploit it the right way can help marketers and customers alike. For instance, sites often encourage bookmarking by linking to bookmarking services - del.icio.us, Facebook, StumbleUpon, Digg. To ensure they include every user's service, sites may include enough links to clutter the page. But if the site knows which service the user likes, it can instead display only the relevant link. This increases the chance the user will click it, and it also just improves the look of the site.