Save for Later: Bookmarking Apps and the Wish Economy | Hacker News Reader

Save for Later: Bookmarking Apps and the Wish Economy

medium.com

59 pointsmorisy18 comments

I like the idea of bookmarking services, but I've never used one due to the fact that I always have enough to do at any given moment. I've never had a moment where I thought "OK, now I have time to get to those articles I bookmarked". If I used such a service I would quickly build up an impossibly large backlog of learning and reading material.

That being said, I can definitely see the value of knowing what people intend to do if they only had the time, money, etc.

Maybe I'll wish I had used a bookmarking service if I live long enough to have my brain uploaded into a computer!

I've found that bookmarking helps relieve my insatiable appetite to Read All The Things. I used to add CDs to an Amazon wishlist to give myself a "cooling off" period before purchasing. This was before decent legal streaming services. It cut my music spending significantly.

I've noticed that I very rarely read articles I bookmarked for later reading. But the subsiding of my compulsion to read them is relieving, so i consider it a benefit.

This off-loading of tasks from (neural) memory to (electronic) notes is equivalently beneficial in other situations. Anyone who finds minor anxieties and tasks keeping them awake at night: write them down. It can help you switch off and sleep.

I use bookmarks for the opposite reason: it's for stuff I've read that I might need to lookup later (a new tool to try out, a reference guide, an interesting article to share, etc). For the read-it-later pages, I just keep open tabs (which Firefox syncs across my devices).

That said, I don't use a separate service, just the browser bookmarks.

I was guilty as well, but since I began to see 'saving something to consume it later' as basically stealing time from my future self for trivial reading of no real consequence (let's be honest, we could unplug from HN, twitter & co. for weeks and not miss out on anything vital) I became much much much more conservative in what I save.

And if you really don't even have time to skim an article at the very moment you found it why are you browsing anyway?

> And if you really don't even have time to skim an article at the very moment you found it why are you browsing anyway?

Sometimes I'm looking for something specific, but come across tangents that look interesting/useful for when I have more time to read.

> let's be honest, we could unplug from HN, twitter & co. for weeks and not miss out on anything vital

Interestingly, for the last few years I've been using HN as my primary news source. It works as a great filter - anything that does not show up on HN is probably irrelevant, and everything of actual consequence - a big earthquake, a war breaking out, etc. - will show up here quickly.

There is only one pure bookmarking app in this list: Pinboard. Pocket & Instapaper are bookmarking/read later Apps. Wunderlist & Evernote are productivity Apps w/bookmarking functionality tacked on (Evernote less so). Tumblr, Pinterest & Product Hunt are social networks.

Hey Everyone,

Just wanted to jump in here and say that me and my business partner are making a bookmarking app that falls in squarely in the visual and private corner of all these apps if you look at the article.

It's called Linkship and you can check it out at https://www.getlinkship.com

It's in the very early stages of development, and we're in the process of adding a whole slew of useful features. Would love for anyone to try it out and give us feedback. We're only two people, but we're working hard to do this right :D

> Collect and share the best of the web together with Linkship for Chrome.

I pay for Pocket and I've dabbled in Instagram. I rolled my own system in Perl and SQL and I spent some time with Yojimbo. I don't remember the names of the other systems competing to help me archive and cross reference data, but it's one of the most important pillars in my workflow. I hope you expand this beyond Chrome, because I like market competition and would love to try it it.

We're definitely going to be expanding beyond Chrome to Safari , Firefox, and likely Edge once it has extension support.

At the moment, we're still in feature development with the product, and Firefox is in the middle of changing its extension platform, so we're trying to get the right timing with porting things over. We should have it soon though!

Evernote is cumbersome for me, but where do people save the multitude of snippits from websites they visit and don't want to forget?

Google Keep - no frills, just the right amount of features. I'd love to find a good OSS alternative, though.

I used to keep a few plain text files for such tidbits, broadly and generally grouped by topic. "work.txt" "programming.txt" "hobbies.txt", etc.

Now, those have been mostly replaced by similarly named folders and I just use wget to save pages & their files into the appropriate category.

The text files still hang around though for little chunks of interesting code, part names/numbers, references, and similar tidbits that do not need any media to go with them.

Occasionally I start new ones, as interests change. When I do, the old files get renamed or deleted. I've got various "notes" text files going back 20+ years, and because they're in plain text files (or html + images), I don't have to worry about services shutting down, proprietary formats changing, etc. It's a system that has been working very well for me, and I don't see any need to change it.

However, I do recognize that this works for me because I do not use a bunch of different devices, so I don't care about syncing, or using my method from mobile devices, etc. If you have those use cases, you'll very likely be happier with something else.

I keep a personal Wiki as a set of plain-text (org-mode) files in Dropbox. I paste snippets into those files. I sometimes even copy contents of entire articles if I find something interesting that if the original URL died in the next couple of years, I'd consider it a great loss.

I just save, file, and tag every article that I read. It means I have a lot article data, but I never have to worry about having an article name on the tip of my tongue or losing an article due to dead links.

I've never used a Wiki as you described it - can you tell me more about your system?

It's a very simple system. I just stuff text files in Dropbox/wiki, with an occasional subfolder for things like projects, essays (I write) and support files that I reference in the wiki entries.

The cross-linking itself is done directly in files. I use org-mode[0] in Emacs for keeping notes. No web access (one day I may some up but I have no pressing need), mobile mostly through Dropbox app itself (there were some mobile apps for org-mode files developed recently that aren't crap, but they're still geared mostly towards the TODO-list features, and I need a general-purpose org-mode notes editor; I haven't found any for Android yet). So I mostly interact with the Wiki whenever I have a computer with Emacs handy (at work I selectively sync wiki/ and several other folders from my personal Dropbox).

A very simple setup, but the real value comes from just storing all those notes over the years. I store everything and anything - from personal information I just can't remember for life (like social-security-bank-insurance-tax-whatever something ID), through cooking recipes, my geek code[1], dieting notes, shell snippets, notes about geopolitics, travel checklists - you name it.

[0] - http://orgmode.org/

[1] - http://www.geekcode.com/geek.html

How about bookmarking app for apps? Mobile phones have limited storage and You can not install everything You want. It would slow down Your phone

Very interesting... as far as I've read. I've saved it for later reading in my Pocket account. I wonder what the author thinks of me.

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