A Simple Bookmarking Service for Link Sharing

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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