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I’m look­ing for a book­mark­ing ser­vice to make it eas­ier and faster for me to share inter­est­ing sto­ries I find to my Twitter, FriendFeed, Plurk, and other fol­low­ers. I use Ping​.fm to post to those ser­vices, and I have TwitterFeed​.com stand­ing by to feed those links into Ping​.fm, but I’m still miss­ing the book­mark­ing ser­vice itself. So, today, in between edit­ing an ebook and try­ing to fig­ure out why chap­ters I edit in InCopy CS4 crash David Blatner’s copy of InCopy CS4, I’m going to be look­ing for a book­mark service.

I read a lot of good sto­ries online, and find a lot of good util­i­ties and sites, that would be of inter­est to peo­ple who fol­low me on Twitter and other social media sites (you can see which ones and visit my var­i­ous pro­files from this page). I would like to share those sto­ries et al. In my Favorites folder I cur­rently have over 300 unfiled book­marks for arti­cles, blog posts, util­i­ties, and other stuff that I want to share (in stages, of course; I don’t want to bom­bard anyone).

Doing it man­u­ally is a pain in the neck because it involves: vis­it­ing the favorite again, copy­ing the URL, going to Ping​.fm, past­ing the URL, switch­ing back to the article/site, copy­ing the title, return­ing to Ping​.fm, and past­ing that before send­ing the link.

I’m too busy for that, and I’m a cre­ative effi­ciency expert. I want an auto­mated sys­tem to do the repet­i­tive work for me–especially going for­ward as I find new links to share. I want a but­ton in my browser that simul­ta­ne­ously saves the link and title to a social book­mark­ing ser­vice and pub­lishes it to my social media lifestream. Again, the lat­ter part is taken care of, assum­ing TwitterFeed can get the links back out of the book­mark­ing service.

Specifically what I’m look­ing for is a ser­vice that fits these sim­ple cri­te­ria:

• Offers a book­marklet to cap­ture the cur­rent page title and URL, that works in at least the major browsers I use concurrently–Maxthon 1.6x, IE8, FF3, and Flock–and if it works in Opera, Safari, and Chrome that would be a bonus.


• When adding a bookmark/link through the book­marklet to my reg­is­tered book­mark­ing ser­vice account I don’t want to be forced to answer a captcha or add a bunch of extra infor­ma­tion like tags, long descrip­tion, etc.

  Mister Wongs, for instance, requires that even the logged in and authen­ti­cated user both enter at least one tag and answer a math captcha before sub­mit­ting the link. That slows down and makes need­lessly dif­fi­cult what should be a sim­ple process. And I need it to be a sim­ple process–I find the page to which I want to link, I press the book­marklet in my browser’s Links/Favorites/whatever bar, up pops the ser­vice page, I click Ok/Submit/Save/Share/whatever, and get returned to the page I had been on.



• The ser­vice must offer a valid and com­plete RSS feed of my links.

  Simpy, which sat­is­fies all my other cri­te­ria, omits both date and GUID infor­ma­tion from its feeds. Thus TwitterFeed​.com can’t use the feed and Simpy becomes use­less to me.



• Links in the RSS should resolve to the orig­i­nal site, not to a hold­ing or vot­ing page ala StumbleUpon.

  Personally I hate get­ting a link on Twitter that makes me click­through two, three, or more other sites before I get to the actual con­tent. I respect people’s desires to pro­mote StumbleUpon, Design Bump, Design Float, VoteTime, Delicious, and so on, but I do not respect it when you chain a story link from StumbleUpon to Design Bump, from Design Bump to Design Float, from Design Float to VoteTime, and so on. Give me a link to the actual con­tent or one inter­me­di­ary at most.

Really, that’s all I want. Hopefully I can find it.

Update: 2009-02-07 16:43: Mister-Wong’s out. AOL’s Propellor out. Simpy out. Mag.nolia not reli­able. I use LaterThis for arti­cles I want to read later, so I don’t want to be rec­om­mend­ing a bunch of arti­cles I haven’t yet read. Mixx out. Design Bump, Design Float, and VoteTime are out because not every­thing I want to share is design-related (nearly all, but entirely all). Design Float would be out any­way because it’s flakey–it recently lost all its data, it keeps for­get­ting my account–and even the links to Design Float’s inter­nal pages are bro­ken. Clipmarks is out because it doesn’t offer a book­marklet, and the but­ton that can be installed crashes Maxthon.

Looks like Furl might do the trick. Buttons/bookmarklets work in all my browser. I’ve plugged my Furl account links RSS feed into TwitterFeed, so now let’s see how it works.

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