Tarpipe’s Bookmarklet – the weakest link in their workflow?

We’ve covered online sharing startup Tarpipe before and they were one of the finalists in the Rising Sun Start-up Presentations at this year’s The Next Web conference. Now the company, which has turned cross-posting of web content into an artform via its powerful workflow-based approach, has launched a Bookmarklet tool for simple browser-based sharing to multiple web services.

Sitting in your browser’s Bookmarks Toolbar, the Bookmarklet allows you to easily share a link and any text you like from a website to a number of services including Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook, Tumblr, Delicious and Evernote. While the Tarpipe bookmarklet works well it does lag behind its competitors by some distance. It cross-posts links and text quickly and efficiently but it comes across as very much a work-in-progress.

The number of services supported is dwarfed by those of the competing Ping.fm Bookmarklet which offers a similar service but can cross-post to over forty services. As yet the Bookmarklet does not support the picture sharing which is a central part of the Tarpipe API.

As a stand-alone end-user product Tarpipe’s Bookmarklet needs work in order to match its rivals. This is a shame as it could be a great advertisement for the powerful API the startup has developed. The complex workflows that can be created for sending data between web services are impressive. Different elements of posts to services (their titles or the tags, for example) can be chained together with a patchbay-like approach to build powerful applications. Just look at this Beer Tasting one for example.

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For now Tarpipe is definitely a company making products for developers and ‘tinkerers’. Most users will find Ping.fm’s solution simpler and easier to use.

UPDATE: The day after this post was published, Tarpipe launched the ability for their API to talk to Calais Yahoo Pipes Web Service.