Never forget a link again
December 21st, 2010 by David Bradley >> 5 Comments
As you probably know, I post a lot of links, on my blogs, on Facebook, on Delicious, on Twitter. But, once they’re posted, retweeted, commented, or ignored, they’re essentially lost. There’s no simple way to keep tabs on them or create some value-added resource from all those links on disparate sites. At least until now that is. I was lucky enough to receive an invite into the beta testing phase of a new site, Trunk.ly
Anyway, connect your Trunk.ly account to Facebook, Delicious and Twitter and it will crawl your status updates, bookmarks, and tweets and present you with a reverse chronological stream of all you’ve linked to on those services. It says it will take an hour or so to do that, but for me, the Twitter index, was complete within a few minutes, although Facebook is taking longer. You can also now import your exported delicious bookmarks which means you need no longer feel like a potential delicious referee after the Yahoo announcement that the delicious service would be shut down at some point. The Trunk.ly service also provides you with a block of your most frequently used tags, so you can see what kinds of things you link to most often.
Trunk.ly does a bit more than that though. It also indexes the web pages that your links point to and builds you a personal search engine, so you never have to tag or describe a link again, you just search and Trunk.ly will find it again for you. Often I find myself remembering that I linked a site but not recalling precisely where or exactly what the site was but knowing for sure that it was about a given topic…search Trunk.ly for that given topic and up pop the hits among which will be the link I lost.
Needless to say, Trunk.ly is a social network too, you can friend/follow and be friended/followed, which makes it all the more useful for social link sharing, importing Facebook friends and other contacts is coming soon the site’s developers tell me. So, follow me as sciencebase on Trunk.ly.
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Alan Crooks // Dec 21, 2010 at 1:18 pm
That looks really useful David. I’ll try it.
One thing that, as a teacher, I find depressing, is the sheer plethora of internet resources. I find it difficult/impossible to organise/recall them. May be this will help.
David Bradley // Dec 21, 2010 at 2:56 pm
I don’t find information overload depressing, I think it’s stimulating, it’s just finding the tools to take control that’s the difficult thing. Information has always been with us, in the “old days” before the digital age that information came in the form of letters, papers, gossip, they were complaining about information overload back in the day, it’s all relative and all relative to what you need to enjoy the work you do and enjoy the hobbies and interests you have.
Trunk.ly has already helped me find “missing links” on three occasions since I started using it and the team is very receptive to new ideas. I asked them to implement a search string function to allow it to be added as a search engine in Chrome and so that one could link to a particular set of search results. Those features are hopefully coming soon.
David Bennett // Dec 21, 2010 at 5:37 pm
Thank you. Got her via your Twitter stream. I was primed because of the Yahoo/Delicious thing, so I already had an html download of my Delicious account.
It went very quickly and yes it helped me immediately with a link I had forgotten to the British Nuclear Veterans Association.
http://www.bntva.com/
David Bradley // Dec 21, 2010 at 7:09 pm
I will give a shout out to my first ten followers on trunk.ly (Off to a fairly slow start, just 4 so far, but will pick up you can betcha).
David Bennett // Dec 21, 2010 at 8:36 pm
Followed you
http://trunk.ly/davidbennett