Search your links

There are few things more irritating than linking to something - because you know you're going to want to see it again, or to inform other people, and then being unable to find it. Or alternatively a friend - and you can never remember which one - linked to something really useful and you're damned if you can find it again. Short of looking like a twonk and posting 'someone linked to something useful recently' (and yes, I have had to do that!) there's no much option is there?

Actually, there are plenty. If you're using Twitter and Delicious, try Packrati.us which takes your tweeted links and saves them neatly on Delicious for you, and adds the #packratius tag (along with any other hash tags) so that it's much easier to find them again. Moreover, the full text of the tweet in included in the bookmark comments. If you see something really useful that someone has has tweeted, simply retweet it, and that'll get added as well. Twitter favourites are however a real pain, since New Twitter has done away with the sensible and useful RSS feed of favourites, but I have a solution to that below.

Trunkly is a great resource. Simply register to use it or link it to your various social media accounts, and this little beauty will keep your links from your blogs, Twitter account (not Favorites!), Facebook, Delicious and LinkedIn. I can also add various other services or specific RSS feeds as well. These can then be searched in various ways - either your own links (in different services) or your friends links. Furthermore, I can also filter my search by Everything, Video, Image or Place. It'll also send you a very handy little email once a week with top shared links as well, so you can quickly browse through them to see what your friends think is really important.

Faveous is a fairly new entrant into the field, and is very like Trunkly, but the choice is slightly wider in my opinion. Sources are very similar, but you can also filter by all media, images, videos, music and documents. One particularly nice feature is the ability to save your Twitter favourites as well however; it can also delete them afterwards if you wish. There's little to choose between both systems, but since it only takes a few moments to set up, why not use both?

I'm going to make a quick flyby mention of a thing called Curated.by which in theory allows you to create 'bundles' of links but it's either very slow in collecting my data, or still very beta buggy. They say of themselves "Curated.by lets you collect & organize topic based content (media, links, tweets) into bundles. Bundles are collections of content around a specific topic, like "The Beatles" or "Technology". Try it if you're interested, and if it works for you, please comment!

How about the things that you've LIKE'd on Facebook? To be honest, this is horrendeous to work out and I'm still not sure that I've got it right, OR that Facebook have either. But hey, this is Facebook we're dealing with. Prepare to dive into mouse click hell. If you're logged into your account, go to Profile (top right), choose 'info' button, then scroll down the page to “Activities and Interests” and click the “Show other pages” This just shows you what you have liked on Facebook though, rather than elsewhere. So we need to look elsewhere. This is where something called LikeJournal comes into play.  Now, I've only just found this and started to use it, so it's not fully tested yet. However, from what I've seen, this resource will not only list all your Facebook page likes, but those of other pages as well, IF you download their Firefox add-on, but unfortunately, this doesn't work with the most recently version, which I've got installed. So, still rather stuck.  This is where we want to get another dinky little search engine called Blekko involved. when you log into blekko through FB connect, your friends automatically become part of your searches. As you search, blekko shows you the results your friends have liked through Facebook, and you can also search only the pages you and your friends have liked and sort results by the number of likes. A search using the /like slashtag looks like this:

This is a seriously useful tool, and if you and your friends are manic 'Likers' on Facebook, take an explore. I highly recommend playing with Blekko, it's a very interesting search engine allround.

Then of course we come to the Google +1 button. Now, this should be a doddle, right? I mean, Google an' all. We're talking GOOGLE! Those little critters have to be easy to search don't they? Err, no. You can see them in your Google Profile:

You can find your profile at https://profiles.google.com/<username>    but as for actually doing anything useful and sensible with them, no. I can't yet find any very useful way to search them, other than peering down the page to see what you've got. Neat huh?

So - various solutions to the problem of checking through your links in a variety of ways. No perfect solution, and it's a disappointingly poor area really - I'd hoped to find many more apps and resources, but this is virgin territory that we're in clearly. Hopefully more will happen in the future - but if you've got your own solution, or apps that you use which I'm not mentioned, please comment!

 

Comments

[pollyalida]

I believe the twitter faves rss is still there, just not at all obvious unfortunately.

http://www.twitter.com/favorites/USERNAME.rss