Share the internet without emailing links! SocialBrowse

I stumble on a lot of interesting articles, web services and other websites. I don't email them around to people all the time because I don't want to be a bother and clog up inboxes. So, I share on google reader and del.icio.us/bballan. I think this allows people to selectively pay attention to me. My only problem is that all of these services are one-way streets, I have no idea what other people are interested in.

I've recommended del.icio.us, google reader and social median as good services for sharing what you're reading with friends (see here, here and here).

It's hard to argue against the value of social recommendation sites. The major problem with them is getting friends use them. I share invites with the hope that some people will get involved. With that in mind, there is a new browser plug-in that can help you discover and share cool websites. It's for Firefox only (but you should be using Firefox 3 anyways).

This new service, socialbrowse, got a great review from Techcrunch. I've got 10 invites to share and am offering them up free to anyone who leaves a message in the comments. (Leave your email address in the form, it doesn't get published, except to me).

This plug-in falls short of getting a discussion going among friends, but it gives points based on the popularity of shared links among your fans, which will at least make it clear what people find interesting. At the very least it can get us sharing links and discovering interesting new things. So, jump on board.

New News Aggregation Site

I have a few Alpha invites for a new news aggregation website called socialmedian. I haven't actually be using it as much as google reader. However, I will admit that the social aspects of socialmedian seem to have potential to be far superior to google reader.

Anyways, if you want in, just post in the comments here and I'll send you an invite code. I think if we get a bunch of people we know on there, it could be really cool. Think I'm making it up? Remember when I got you pre-invited to Hulu?

New Features

Friends, you may have noticed that I've added a few more items to my sidebar. One is a quick view of my shared items on Google Reader (which I love, but you knew that already). I also added two things related to del.icio.us (which I praised here). The first is a sidebar item with my most recently bookmarked items. The second is an RSS feed to my most recently posted del.icio.us items. I thought this feed would be interesting for two reasons. First, it lets me easily share items with everyone regardless of which feed reader you use (and I have to assume that no one is using Google Reader because I have no new friends). Also, I think that I read a lot of interesting stuff and rather than email it out to people and feel bad about sending around a bunch of stuff no one is interested in, I can have this feed where people can choose how and when to consume it. I think you might be able to create your own feed from my bookmarks based on the tags by adding /'tag' to the end, but I'm not sure.

Hope you take advantage, and if you set yourself up with a del.icio.us account, let me know so that I can get into your network.

Sharing is Caring

Ok, I tried to get you on Google Reader, but you weren't interested. Only one person took me up on it (thanks, Sach).

What is it that you people don't understand? Isn't it clear that the internet is powerful? Isn't it clear that there is too much information for each of us to deal with on our own? Isn't this why people send around articles to their friends?

A common 'meme' (to use the parlance of our times) is that "news that is interesting will find me." I agree with that. However, it helps to have a living, breathing social network to help disseminate that news faster. It also helps to harness the power of the internet. We're living in an age of unprecedented innovation, with very useful free services being created every day. If we don't take a look around, we might be left behind.

I keep up with the world around me by using Google Reader and sharing posts (if you were my 'friend', you would have gotten an invite code to a new service today). I also use del.icio.us. Previously, I recommended instapaper, and I still do for news articles and the like. In that same post, I even said that I never really got into delicious. Well, that's changed. I'm now using it to keep my bookmarks organized.

I LOVE tagging as a mechanism for organization. You just give a couple of one word descriptors for each bookmark and you can always find your bookmarks in a given category. Go check out my bookmarks. You'll immediately notice that I've bookmarked a bunch of websites about apartment and others with cool productivity tools.

The next benefit of delicious is that its a web service. As you may recall, I'm enamored with web services. I love having access to my email, feeds, bookmarks , etc from any computer with an internet connection (which is by the way almost all computers and many cell phones). In this case, I find that its useful to have access to my links from work, home and sometimes a friend's computer.

Now, if only some of my friends would get on these web services with me, I'd have access to a much richer world of information and entertainment. Imagine if you had never heard of youtube or facebook or hulu. I'm just here giving you some of the tools that make the social web more interesting. Take a look at the 'Follow me to..." box on the right side of this page to see some of the services that I'm using/trying out. There's obviously a lot more out there than this, but I think it's a pretty good start. Let me know what you think in the comments.

I'll read that later

I read a lot of things on the internet. The blogs, the MSM (NYT, WSJ, etc), and other random things. I find a bunch of interesting things to read while I'm at work, without time to read them. Often, I would end up forgetting about them because I didn't have a good way to mark it to read later at home.

The NYT has 'My Timesfile', which is great, but limited to that specific site. I never got into del.icio.us because I didn't necessarily care what other random people were bookmarking, and hardly anyone of my friends uses it.

Along comes Instapaper. It's perfect. Totally plain, just put a bookmarklet in your browser and you're good to go. That's really all there is to say about it--its that straightforward. The bookmarklet lets you bookmark any page for reading from any computer for later. So, for an easy way to save reading for later, check it out.