Tag Archives: link

DON’T Click That Link!

I am an addict. I am addicted to browse my Twitter timeline, facebook newsfeed or email and click tons of link about anything that smells even remotely related to my topics of interest which again are almost as wide as Amazon’s product catalog.

As you might have guessed, it is not a particularly good thing to keep clicking link after link, opening browser window after window and then shuffling between the read/unread links and your work. This behavior is equivalent to having your arteries clogged with cholesterol only to be waiting to have a heart attack except it’s not the heart attack that kills you but the daily grind of too many links begging for your attention and the overloaded/ever slowing system.

Despite wanting to get over this stupid habit of reading more and more for some time now I couldn’t fix it, but something in me clicked yesterday when I decided to close all the open links on my laptop. Since they were all choicest articles/site discovered accidentally( or with planning ) over weeks I decided to save them temporarily in a google docs spreadsheet. By the time I was done, the spreadsheet had some 131 links. Exactly. WTF?

While doing this it occurred to me that *MAYBE* it would have been nice to have a “link saving/queuing” website/app. Here’s I think would be a nice utility to have(at least for me)

Problem: I need a service that let’s me save/hold all the various links that I find everyday, which look interesting and I’d want to read/skim them over free time.

Solution: A link buffer

How it works: A browser bookmark or a URL based utility which can be used to put all these seemingly good links in temp memory(stored unless you choose to delete).

Random Execution Work Flow: Spotted a link that you’d like to archive for future reference?

Append  the url to a predefined url format for ex: http://savemylinks.com/mayankdhingra/newlink=”insertlinkhere”

PS: The site will redirect you to the login page if you aren’t signed in already.

So now whenever you are free, you can go to savemylinks.com to see what all links you had saved and browse them. Based on your preferences you can choose to send them to delicious or anything bookmarking site or post it on Twitter/Facebook.

But by the time I or someone else builds this app. It might a good idea to archive these links in a notepad or google docs spreadsheet and read them later when you have more time.

Update: Apparently there’s a site called instapaper.com which does just that. (Thanks @guglanisam for the tip)

Twitter Search: No Looking Back ?

Have a look at the Twitter search result page below.

twitter search result page

Can you see something missing ?

Ever since we had search.twitter.com ( I think after the summize acquisition) I’ve always wondered how come there isn’t a link to go back to the Twitter home page from the search result page. Though it makes PERFECT sense that there should be a visible link to the main page on the top section of the result page or at least the Twitter logo should redirect to the main page , none of them exists.

Instead they have a inconscpicous little “Twitter Home” link at the page footer which I bet would be hardly used.

twitter home link on page bottom

Thinking aloud, could it be that ever since Twitter acquired Summize they never really thought of putting the Twitter homepage link which was missing in Summize(it didn’t need a home page link as it was just a search tool and search can be done the search result page too).

For those of you who joined the Social Media bandwagon late, here’s what  Summize looked like.


summize (Image credits http://www.flickr.com/photos/toprankblog/)

familiar to the F? 🙂

What do you think about this, a missing chunk of usability resulting from oversight or something else ?