Iterasi, a bookmarking toolbar and web service we first mentioned in January, is now expanding its private beta. If you visit the site to sign up for an account today, there's a good chance you'll be let in almost immediately. At least that was our experience. Your results may vary.

So what is iterasi? It would be easy to dismiss the service as yet another bookmarking tool. You add a toolbar to your browser and you can tag and save pages to your account, which you can then access from any browser. But unlike similar services like del.icio.us, iterasi saves dynamic content. In other words, you can "notarize" a page like Download Squad, and the service will take a snapshot of the page as it looked the day you saved it. You can also use the service to save a copy of a custom Google Map, or take a snapshot of today's cover of the New York Times.

And since iterasi saves a snapshot of a page and not just a link, you can actually share the page as you saw it with other users thanks to some embed code.

Iterasi currently only supports Firefox 2 and Internet Explorer 7. Firefox 3 support is coming soon.

Iterasi is a new bookmarking service that allows users to save dynamic web content. What does that mean? Once upon a time web pages were relatively static. If you wanted to see the content of a web page, all you had to do was enter a URL and up pops your news article, movie listings, or photo collection. But today more and more sites are packed with dynamic content which changes regularly while the page's URL remains the same.

For example, imagine you're searching Google Maps and you zoom in and drag the map around. When you bookmark the page, all you get is a link to the map you saw when you started. Or what about pages that are changing every day like Techmeme or the New York Times? Sure, you could bookmark pages for individual articles, but what if what you really want to save is the equivalent of today's front page of the paper?

You could take a screenshot of those pages, but once you save the text content as an image file, you lose the ability to search the page. And that makes it pretty unlikely that you'll be able to find that page again when you need it. Iterasi solves this problem (even if you didn't know it was a problem) by creating snapshots of web sites using a process the company calls "notarizing."

All you have to do is install a browser toolbar and click the notarize button any time you see a page you want to save. It will be saved in its current state to Iterasi's online service. The page includes active links, searchable text, and everything else you could need. You can find your content by logging into your account from any web browser. You can also add notes and tags to pages for easier indexing. And of course, you can share pages with your friends. Iterasi also includes a scheduling application for saving pages at regular intervals. So if you want to save the front page of your local paper once a day or 6 times a day, you can schedule automated backups.

[via Mashable]