i recently understood that i want to stop sending links to friends by email and wanted them to be able to consume my ‘stuff’ in a much more convenient manner.
i tried a few existing bookmarking services but no one gave me just what i wanted, so as i always do, i set out to do it on my own. the good thing about this, is that i’ve created something that serves a very specific purpose, i called it listplow.
my requirements were:
- sharing something must take exactly 1 click.
- the resulting list of shared items must be easily consumed.
- this thing should have minimum or no GUI at all.
the first requirement is satisfied using a custom bookmarklet that contains encrypted information used to identify who you are. once you drag this bookmarklet to your bookmarks toolbar all you need to do is click it, and the page you’re on is added to your listplow. if you happen to have some text selected on the page, that text will be used as the description for the item.
for the second requirement i’ve created two major ways to consume. the first is simple RSS, which i believe is best used in my friend’s feed-readers. a friend who likes my flow of links can now add me in netvibes/pageflakes/igoogle/etc’. the moment i add something to my listplow (with a single click), it will show up on my friends reader in a matter of minutes, depending on the configuration of his RSS reader.
the second interesting way is a little piece of ebmed code that essentially allows showing listplows on most blogging/social-networks/etc sites. for a good example, look at my listplow showing on the right hand side of my blog. this is cool, because the moment i listplow something, and somebody goes to my site, he/she sees it there, which is just cool.
the third requirement is also a core part of the process. as you can see, there is no GUI along the way. when i go through my day and listplow things, i don’t go through any listplow gui, i don’t answer any question, i just go on with my stuff.
for me its a great way to communicate what i plow through on the web, its easier for my friends and online-consumers to digest this (much better than a constant flow of emails).
what’s next ?
i’m thinking of adding a way for a listplower to delete/modify links. the nice thing is that i don’t want to force him to do it from www.listplow.com, but i’ll allow him to do it directly from any embedded site (more soon).
also, i’d like to offer statistics on how many people consume the feed/embed tag. this can be found in other places, but it would be nice to get some built-in statistics on the consumption of this.
so, what do you do ? go ahead to www.listplow.com, create an account in one simple step, drag the bookmarklet to your bookmarks toolbar and start listplowing.
oh, and don’t forget to send your friends the address of your new personal RSS feed, or just embed your list into your existing blog.
here’s my listplow RSS feed