Last week, I wrote a little rant on the bookmarking hell I currently find myself in. After struggling to find a solution that was light, nimble, and easy enough for my needs, I may have finally stumbled on a bookmarking tool that solves my problems: LinkThing.co
LinkThing takes a delightfully old-school approach to bookmarking. That is, there is no feature bloat, it isn’t trying to turn into a social discovery platform, and there is certainly none of the pretentious lofty talk that plagues services like Pocket. It’s simple, easy bookmarking, and it is exactly what I wanted.
Bookmarking, Without the Whistles and the Bells
The UI is simple and easy to navigate. It’s almost web 2.0 in some respects (which is a good thing here). Your bookmarks are sorted by date, though you have the option of sorting by popularity (‘Most Clicked First’) or even shuffling the links to discover random reading material.
You can search through bookmarks by keywords, find them by hashtags, or use keywords. You can also sort hashtags/keywords by popularity, or shuffle them to discover random stuff. It’s simple, and not too feature-rich, but that’s exactly how I like it.
One very neat way to find bookmarks is by combining keywords and hashtags, and sorting them via the built-in AND/OR functionality.
You can even create shortcuts from commonly used searches or keyword/hashtag combinations. These shortcuts show up in the top menu bar for easy access.
I’m a big fan of these shortcuts and the ability to combine keywords and hashtags. It’s also incredibly easy to create sharable lists of your favorite links simply by creating a query, and clicking the ‘Make Public’ button, which will create a publicly viewable list of those links.
LinkThing is a side project of Winnipeg, Canada based developer Rod Edwards, who created LinkThing after he was unable to find a quick, simple and light bookmarking tool. You can get in touch with him on Twitter or LinkedIn.
I’ve switched to LinkThing as my primary bookmarking tool, and Rod is constantly improving the service.
What do you think? Can it replace Delicious and Pocket for you?
Image Credit: Sarah Parrott
