One thing I enjoy most about services like Twitter and Friendfeed are the interesting links people post. Whenever I’m in a desperate need of some inspiration, I head over to social bookmarking sites such as Stumbleupon, delicious and some Dutch version. Yet there are more services like this, all offering different ways to present or save interesting finds on the web. Though they’re not that well-known. Let’s change that. Here are sixupcoming tools to share and find interesting links. Start sharing!
Photo by F33
1. Iterasi, save your webpages (private beta)
So you’re now checking out a list of social bookmarking services, yet I can already tell you that not one looks as fancy as Iterasi. It’s a browser-based service that not just saves a link to the preferred page, but includes ALL the information – even links and images. After logging in to Iterasi, you can just scroll through those pages you wanted to save for later. One of the most important advantages is searching through the text. So searchability doesn’t just depend on your tagging skills anymore. For more info I gladly refer to Eric Eldon from Venturebeat , who has published a review.
www.iterasi.com
2. Fleck, annotate the web (beta)
Full disclosure: I’m sitting next to talented developer Lenniez (he’s a good photographer as well) whose actually responsible for this groundbreaking tool. Inspired by Kevin Kelly‘s story We are the Web, three entrepreneurs in white suits have started this service that offers you the possibility to note specific places on any web page with a bookmarklet or fancy flash browser tool. Comes in very handy when you are reviewing a website or if you want to point out a spelling error, to name a few examples. I specifically use it to enrich my links on Twitter (example of the Twitter integration here).
www.fleck.com
3. Socialmedian, social news aggregator (private beta)
New kid on the block by Jobster founder Jason Goldberg that got some blog coverage last month. It’s a social news aggregator which allows you to clip interesting stories. Browse through various News Groups and share relevant links with other news group members. Perfect for folks who want tips from like-minded people. Read the review by Mashable’s charming Kristen Nicole to learn more about this service. Oh and by the way, according to our UK WebTipr David Petherick, it “might be a next big thing”.
www.socialmedian.com
4. i-Lighter, save parts of the Internet
Remember that yellow marker you used in high school and university? Well, I certainly can recall hours of highlighting important stuff in my textbooks. Now there is a digital equivalent to mark text and images you want to save or share. Just download the Windows or Apple desktop app and relive that yellow marker experience for your social bookmarking convenience. The traditional press – such as The New York Times – love this service, probably because the yellow highlighter is such a familiar tool. They’ve probably ignored the useful Twitter integration, as they didn’t use that in highschool.
www.i-lighter.com
5. Bemba
The two kind guys from Bemba aim for people who don’t why complicated services, they just want to get the job done. After these people have installed the Bemba plugin — there’s no bookmarklet — they can share anything entertaining they find on social networks with just two clicks. I interviewed the CEO Aaron Peters a couple of weeks ago and he told me that “Bemba provides the easiest way to share web content with friends, on any social network or (micro)blog. This way we make the web more fun.” So they’re basically competing with the Share option of Facebook. Read the rest of the interview for more info about this challenge for Bemba.
www.bemba.com
6. Instapaper
Instapaper helps you to get rid of the ’2read’ tags in del.icio.us by offering a simple bookmarklet and even simpler website. Developer Marco Arment left every fancy function out and focused just on the basics: temporary storage for long articles. Therefore, the site is easy accessible – even with my crappy mobile phone and iPod Touch. After I wrote about Instapaper on April 1, I started using it a lot and browsed to the web page every Saturday for some serious reading.
www.instapaper.com
So that’s it for the new and upcoming sharing and saving tools. Now it’s up to you — which service will you use? Or did I forget your favorite one? Please share it in the comments, so we can create one helluva alternative social bookmarking list.
Thanks for this list Ernst-Jan, looks like there are some really useful applications out there. I’ll try some of them out this weekend to see which ones fit in my need to help me get interesting articles better organised. Helps me to get rid of the ‘post-overflow-moments’ – I tend to forget reading some good posts after I made my selection what to read.
Thanks Ernst-Jan for mentioning Fleck. Fleck is especially cool when you work in groups or teams. You can easily save interesting websites or articles in ‘the collective mind’ of a group.
For instance if you run a weblog with a group of people, you can share interesting websites for that blog in your fleck group, with their comments on it. this content is available for all group members at all times where ever they are. As the collective mind can be searched through you can easily find for instance similar sites about a subject you’re writing an article about.
Same thing actually for any other type of business, and the bigger the group or business the more interesting it gets to see what people think is interesting on the web. you kind of build your own vertical search engine.
For the Bemba bookmarklet, please check: http://michmich.com/bemba
I created it, cause I love Bemba!
I just love Instapaper. It’s simple, fast and convenient. I use it all the time as a temporary store for stuff I want to read later, but not sure if I want to put it on delicious.
So what exactly is upcoming about Fleck? I got an invite to that service as early as April 2006.
@richard, the first version of fleck was not focused on bookmarking. The version that is live now (since a couple of weeks) is a totally new service.
Great tools, thanks for sharing them!