The Ultimate Bookmarking Tool Is Finally Here | Hacker News Reader

The Ultimate Bookmarking Tool Is Finally Here

arcticstartup.com

62 pointsdragdis68 comments

The problem with bookmarks is not whether i need 2 or 4 clicks - it's about sync, browser & device integration, search, temporary dumps with follow-up, intelligent tagging, storing an offline copy, read-later formatting, adding metadata and even credentials, compilations, research buckets, etc. Neither pinboard nor delicious have solved this for me and i doubt some fancy d&d tool will do it.

And that is why I use Firefox sync, and I work on hosting my own sync node on a VPS. None of my co-workers understand the utility boost in seeing, all from a server-side encrypted store:

- Passwords - Bookmarks - History - Open tabs on other devices - Extensions - The list goes on

You can say the other things about Chrome and Chromium (as of recently, even the encryption part) but I do not see the docs, the code, and infrastructure published and public like Mozilla has done. Hell, someone even built in a sync mechanism in PHP to ownCloud, to make it more useful.

It is efforts like this that make me, despite other warts, a militant Firefox user. The software is ok, but an institution that pushes standards and worries about my privacy, the whole shebang, is really worth it to me.

I use pinboard, and in my opinion it has adequate solutions to almost all of the things you mentioned.

I tend to use it more as a history of sites that I've looked at though, for research I would use Zotero.

Even though thinkery's (http://thinkery.me/) main purpose is not storing bookmarks it handles quite a few of the points that you list well. check it out.

Indeed. Will have I easy access to my data when the service is eventually sunset? Does it work on iOS/Android?

Those are the questions a service has to answer for it to leave its mark, IMO.

We launched private beta month ago, so now we are focusing on the web app. After few months you will be able to sync with iOS/Android.

Also we gonna build a tool that everything you collect to dragdis would automatically go to dropbox, gdrive or skydrive.

The "number of clicks" table and the pain described in the video (when you see a nice picture online, you'll want to navigate through a messy folder structure and save it to your filesystem) reeks of not having a good idea of the niche the product is trying to fill. The first is fallacious (I don't know how they count, by I can clip things to Evernote in two clicks and I don't think a long drag is necessarily better than two clicks), the second is just weird - non-social bookmarking is as old as the browser, it's called "bookmarks". The UI for the site just looks like Pinterest.

> non-social bookmarking is as old as the browser, it's called "bookmarks".

But "bookmarks" sucks for many people. I want something like any of those social bookmark sites, but I have no interest in the social stuff. I just want a nicer way to see my bookmarks.

> The UI for the site just looks like Pinterest.

And compared to a huge nested list of folders looking like Pinterest is probably a good thing.

I have no disagreement with these points, my point is that they're competing against a straw man. This leaves me with the question; what do they actually do different from their actual competition? When leave me to speculate that they're just another social bookmarking clone, bringing little new to the table.

The ultimate bookmarking tool: Google.

Just google for something you want to use. It works like magic. The info is always up to date [1], it always finds what you need from the most obscure of references your brain comes up with, and no links are ever broken.

Oh and everything is a single click away. Win.

[1] no working off of stale bookmarks where the author neglected to go back and say "HEY THIS IS BAD NOW, DONT DO IT"

An English MP was caught in the expenses scandal. That MP was facing heavy criticism in the press for some of the things they had claimed for.

To respond better to the press this MP paid for public relations training.

The MP then claimed for the PR training on expenses.

I read about this in a national UK newspaper. (Either the Telegraph, or the Independent, or the Grauniad.)

I cannot find the name of the MP or the story.

Web searching doesn't always work.

You mean the first hit for googling "telegraph MP expense scandal" http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/mps-expenses/9815...

It's about "The police have re-opened their enquiry into the former MP Denis MacShane after he admitted submitting fake receipts to claim expenses.", which sounds a lot like your story.

So I'm guessing the guy you're looking for is Denis McShane.

No, but thanks for playing.

Specifically, there is no mention in that report of expenses claimed for public relations training.

Are you referring to this: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/mps-expenses/5425...

I found this article as a link from the first result of: telegraph MP expense scandal "public relations" training (I added the quotes because lots of articles about MPs seemed to have "public" in them without mentioning "public relations").

You should have bookmarked it. Then you could have posted the link here and we could have found it on Google :)

I love how people want to show you how clever they are ("I found it!") rather than deal with your topic for what it was. Is it desperately wanting an upvote, or "Can't wait to prove someone else wrong"? Oh well.

> no links are ever broken.

I'd take my broken links over Google's "Did you mean..." any time. Practically speaking, except for constantly recommended stuff, Google's memory doesn't go more than a year or so back in the past, unless you know very precisely what you are looking for (at the very least, title and author of stuff).

Probably depends on what you're looking for?

When I'm googling for coding tips, I often find blogposts that are several years old simply because they're still relevant and still solve my problem.

Guess it's different for news ... but I wouldn't look for old news anyway. Or at least I haven't needed to so far.

Google doesn't always find the thing I want, at least in the context of a bookmark, which is something specific that I want to return to. When I consult my bookmarks it's not necessarily to remember the broad strokes of a story, it's to read someone's take or even a specific line from an article that I only vaguely remember now that some time has passed, but suspect was really good. Sometimes Google gets me what I want, but often there are similar stories from larger sources that trump what I'm looking for.

Sometimes I feel like going back through things I liked (or have been meaning to read for a while) about a certain topic in bulk, so bookmarks with tags are nice. Querying Google to show me everything I've thought looked interesting about [x] won't work.

Sometimes you want something that isn't up anymore. Google has cached pages for lots of stuff but not everything. Pinboard will keep a copy of everything I bookmark.

I tend to google to re-discover things I already have bookmarked. It usually takes more effort to look for the bookmark.

Yes, when I noticed this I stopped using bookmarks :)

Honestly, my bookmarks are a dramatically better resource than Google for many things.

Remember: Google is full of SEO optimized bullshit and the highest links are generally the ones that want to be highest and not necessarily the best.

Or, another way: The best resources online are not always posted by SEO-friendly people on major websites. I can curate those gems into an awesome list.

Google misses gems and Google is curated only by an algorithm that is heavily targeted for manipulation.

Pinboard.in FTW

1. I use the bookmarklet to add bookmarks

2. I write a short description for the bookmark

3. I click on one of my existing tags or add a new one

4. The Pinboard organize tool shows a preview of the content so I can edit bookmarks quickly

5. Automatically archives my retweets and links posted to Twitter

6. Let's me have private and public bookmarks

Just sayin' for me bookmarking is a solved problem.

Personally, I don't want something with unique UI features like folders popping up on my browser window. That just interrupts the workflow I've already developed.

I also appreciate that I paid for Pinboard and can reasonably expect it to be around for awhile without getting acquired or shutting down.

What are Pinboard's tag management tools like? Can I merge tags together?

Does it show the number of items tagged with a tag when tagging a new item? I found that v useful until Delicious removed it (often I enter synonyms by accident, and this helps me control my tag vocabulary)

Without a trial of Pinboard it's very hard to answer these questions...

I don't think it shows the number, but it does make suggestions from the list of tags you've already used. If you type out your tags manually it uses autocomplete so you don't end up with typos or fragmenting your stuff with minor variations (like making something plural half the time).

I believe that's explained here:

http://pinboard.in/tour/#manage

note: I don't use pinboard myself but I looked around after seeing OP's rec

No, that doesn't answer my questions. I've been through the tour numerous times and it's rather too minimalist - which either means there's a small feature set, or the author of Pinboard isn't marketing minded

IMHO, it makes no sense to pay to bookmark other people's websites/URLs. As a least minimum, you can keep your bookmarks to yourself in your own browser. It is however another matter if you are paying to acquire additional features which your browser doesn't provide by default.

What i found most interesting about this is the slimmed down nature of what you collect. In the video, when you showed the grid of things you've collected... it was really appealing.

I think the real strength of this would be in it's technical implementation; how not-annoying is it in my browser, is it resource heavy, how can i adjust it etc, and then the community around it.

Which is where i think there would have to be some real differences between Pinterest. If you give the user the option to share (or not!) what he/she has collected with other people (perhaps a dedicated page), and played with the idea of how users could interact with each other ("This is what Julie collected on Tuesday," - then i think this idea could have even more potential than it already does.

Good luck to you folks. As i said this is really interesting.

I just wanted to add that in modern browsers you can bookmark with 0 mouse clicks. Just CTRL+D it.

In Firefox it additionally focuses the "Tags" field which I find awesome. I was skeptical initially towards tags, but it's much easier to tag stuff with a brain dump of keywords coming to my mind, than to nicely put it into some hierarchical structure. The latter never worked for me.

The challenge is to manage synonymous tags in one's mind. I frequently tag something with e.g. javascript-foo tag and some other thing with foo-javascript. But you can easily move it later in the Library (CTRL-SHIFT-B).

Firefox handles search using the URL, the title stored, the tags, so with a mixture of all those in your location bar, it's super easy to find things. CTRL-L to focus the location bar and here you go.

Using vimperator, it takes an 'a' to bookmark anything. And using scripts,[1] I can bookmark things in kippt pressing 'A'.

[1]: http://code.google.com/p/vimperator-labs/issues/detail?id=78...

Can you confirm that Firefox sync handles the tags correctly?

I've had great luck with xmarks, which correctly syncs the tags. But I'd like to know that there is always an alternative for a feature that I've come to depend so much on.

Bookmarking with Firefox is propriety. You won't be able to take your stuff out easily to another browser and/or do inter-operate. Firefox tags are just Firefox' tags.

I haven't used Firefox Sync actually so I can't tell.

The issue isn't bookmarking and making that simpler. It's realizing that when we bookmark something, we often bookmark a sentence, paragraph, or area of a page that we have no way of easily finding of what they bookmarked mentally. Ever needed to go through dozens of link in a category or folder to find the "one". Having an intelligent search for the annotations of the web that you make live is invaluable for finding and sharing all the information you extract and want to save for re-use later.

If anyone can compare this to Diigo, I'd be much obliged.

Does Diigo support reading and annotating quotes offline on the iPad app? Like InstaPaper + Quotes / Annotations? The iPad app does not look too fancy in the app store, I have to say. Apart from that I like the service's offering.

I'm finding Diigo's strength to be in the browser. I haven't tried the mobile apps in a while and I know others have these features.

One neat part of Diigo for me is being able to create an rss feed that you could presumably feed into one of these other apps.

The clicks that are displayed in this table: http://dragd.is/K6xbz Are counted when you need to choose a particular folder, notebook, board. So with Evernote it's yes two clicks if you want to save it whatever the default place is, but if you want to choose a specific place it gets to 4-6 clicks!

Clicking is so 2000-ish!

That kind of article doesn't appeal to me. I've been using both Pocket and Kippt, as well as Evernote. What does your product bring that those three don't?

I feel like you should have shared your homepage instead (i.e. http://www.dragdis.com/).

In my opinion, for a bookmarking tool to be "ultimate" it at least has to store the content of the web page and allow searching the content. Basically it should be a search engine that uses your bookmarks as the source of sites to crawl. This removes the burden of having to properly tag/organize bookmarks and makes bookmarks easier to find later.

Google Bookmarks does this: https://www.google.com/bookmarks/

I've been using Google Bookmarks for years and am pretty happy with it even though it doesn't look like Google is developing it any further. There are other bookmarking products that provide this as well.

I have two levels of bookmarking:

Very fast - bookmarking in chrome.. just one click, I bookmark everything into one folder named as current year (so 2013 now). I have chrome profile synced on all my computers. This way I bookmark things that "are kind of interesting and I might want to see it later (but probably not)"

More important stuff - delicious.. requieres me to type some description and tags, which also means that I put there things that I really want to come back to later

The only thing I am missing from delicious is saving the content of the bookmark and making it searchable..

Several options do this, I think all of them paid. Diigo, Historious, and many people here on HN swear by Pinboard.

I think the issues described in this blog post, I still haven't found a solution to bookmark the huge quantity of information I index every day on the Internet. Pocket is very nice for reading, but lacks a proper organisation, Evernote can organise things pretty well, but does not work very well with websites imo. I am curious to try Dragdis and judge by myself.

For those wondering about synchronisation and mobile, I think these are key elements for a bookmarking service to succeed, future will tell how good Dragdis support will be.

You should check out linkies.com - disclaimer I'm a co-founder. Anyways linkies organizes your posts/bookmarks based on the hashtags you use. You can even group hashtags into groups that we are calling grashtags. You can also subscribe to just the topics you are interested in to create a custom news feed of links updated by the people you trust. it's currently in private beta but let me know if you want early access and I will see what I can do.

I went to the Dragdis website to check it out, and found the user experience (with the awkward scrolling) so jarring that I decided not to sign up for it.

With Pocket, Kippt, Evernote to collect stuff in a organised fashion is 4-5 clicks. With dragdis it's 1 drag&drop! So main thing - simplicity

I cringe every single time I see you mention the amount of click needed to save something. It's really annoying. If that's the only thing you do better than the competition then you need to rethink this.

Something else: I think positioning yourself against pocket is a bad idea. They're two different products. Pocket doesn't try to be a reference/long term bookmarking product, but a read-it-later type one. It even started with that name.

For me, with Pocket, it's usually two clicks, and typing a tag or two in between. Or one click when I just want to "read later" without bothering with organizing.

I use a two-click bookmarking method called Tumblr. Have your Tumblr bookmarklet on your browser's bookmarks toolbar. Click on it to activate the saving of link you wish to bookmark. Click on publish in the Tumblr bookmarklet window. Done. Two-clicks done and it is fast enough.

Tumblr's bookmarklet is the fastest of all three blogging platforms I have experienced: Blogspot and Wordpress the other two.

I would be willing to pay good money for the ultimate bookmarking tool.

But it needs to be a good combination of instapaper and delicios.

I have developed a solution using the pocket api, whereby I can auto tag certain items based on a number of factors.

This has proved quite useful and has got rid of a lot of the pain points I had with these sort of services before.

https://github.com/Newky/PocketPy

Uhrm, I can already drag bookmarks onto the bookmark bar/folder to make them. That's built into my browsers.

And I can already drag images and text from my browser onto my desktop and it will automatically save them. (Or into my dropbox folder if I want it synced.)

Why on earth would I need this? I don't see a use case.

The whole 'give some random [small] company pointers to everything on the Internet that I care about' creeps me out approximately the same as giving Google that info indirectly (for different reasons), but Google provides an indispensable convenience.

Cargocollective has the same drag and drop bookmarking UI. Shows up whenever you drag anything on their network. Indeed it is the right UI for that particular task. But it's also easy enough for other services to copy.

When I tried to sign up, it refused to accept an email that contained a + sign.

My problem with bookmarking tools is that I horde links in them that I actually never go back and look for. I usually just use my brain as an index for some keywords and then utilize Google search.

I should add that I've pretty much given up on bookmarking tools because I've left a trail on delicious, the old Google one, Springpad, Clipboard, etc... I'm not just using plain-jane Notational velocity notes, and I'm pretty diligent in writing why I'm saving a link, whether it's an interesting library I need to use some day, or a good article that I read where I learned something. I'll usually summarize what I learned.

I posted this morning about bookmarking and link curation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5367663

dragdis is not the solution.

Curation of personal information is the BIG problem IMO. The closest I've gotten is to stay within the Microsoft ecosystem. Almost everything is there, and the Windows Phone 8 puts it all in my pocket.

But still, I find myself compiling master files and I haven't yet scratched that bookmarking / project management / gtd itch. It's my holy grail now

Interesting! Here's my take on bookmarking: http://anunnaki.me

Holy crap! The time trigger is a brilliant idea.

It's kind of similar to Gimme Bar → https://gimmebar.com/

Is arctic startup the new techcrunch?

i do love how dragdis implemented that scrollable demo animation

http://www.dragdis.com/#a

moving the scroll back slightly back and fourth actually makes the animation move smoothly back and fourth!

Interesting... it doesn't allow signing up as example+dragdis@gmail.com

"Thank you, we will contact you soon" uh!

Very similar to a side-project I'd been working on for Chrome! Can't wait to get into the beta and see if it hits all the points I want hit from a bookmarking service!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com