Antisocial bookmarking

Every time I want to save or share a link these days, I run headlong into a wall of frustration. There are so many options but none of them are right; they're barely even close. I haven't built bookmarking into giraffe yet, so I'm stuck between these options:

"Readability" is Readability, but every other link there is for saving bookmarks. If I want to save a plain web bookmark, I have a few options. If I click "delicious":

The important things to note here are (a) it completely ignored the text I'd selected to quote, (b) half the window is crap I don't use (like Send, or the visible tag list), (c) it's 2009 but these tags are space delimited, and (d) this is the service I have to use if I want anyone to see links I save.

I still have a soft spot for Gnolia, but when I click its link (I use the mini-marker):

This is a much more compact view, which is nice. After getting used to Gnolia providing star ratings, I added ratings to Delicious and got really used to them. Since I first saw them on Gnolia, I'm not sure why the mini-marker doesn't have ratings. On the other hand, Gnolia uses a four-star rating system, and though I tried a couple times I can't adjust mentally from the Netflix five-star system—so maybe it doesn't matter that they're there anyway.

Also no one will see anything I post to Gnolia.

Here's Pinboard:

Not pleasing aesthetically, but that doesn't really matter. It doesn't have ratings, though. I hadn't noticed the nice touch that it preselects the tags field. The "tldr" link is also Pinboard, since it has the unread list feature, which I totally use. That link doesn't even prompt, it just pops up, saves the link, and closes itself. Handy.

But no one will see anything I post to Pinboard. (Handily that doesn't matter for tldr links.)

You might notice it's not in my link bar, but I had tried briefly to switch to a TypePad linkblog using the great new bookmarklet:

This is a pretty nice bookmarklet, but for the purpose of bookmarking it's not only missing ratings but tags, altogether. However, it's the one option that realizes the quote I wanted to quote is a quote, instead of leaving it in the description field for me to quote myself. Also this makes blog posts instead of bookmarks—not even link assets in my TypePad library—so it's ultimately not that useful for this, I think.

I would find it funny that none of these services are quite correct, but since I only remember that when trying to share a bookmark, it's really a moment of burning frustration that immediately collapses into a disappointed malaise. I guess I might just have to do it myself.

posted by markpasc at 18:48 on 22 Oct 2009