laterstars blog

bookmarklet!

Since we started the site I’ve been thinking of ways to get stuff that I don’t find on Twitter into laterstars. I basically want laterstars to be my One True Place for everything I want to save and read later, and I’ve got to admit that I don’t come across everything I’m interested in from my Twitter stream. So, what are the options?

My first idea was to tap into other services, much like we’re leveraging Twitter’s often overlooked favorites. Basically, the thought was to enter my delicious or pinboard user name and then monitor it every once in a while for links tagged with “laterstars” and it would pull them in much like faved tweets. Seems simple enough, and would let me use existing bookmarklets and even third party apps like Pukka. So, I started working on it.

As I started writing code, though, I began to realize it might not be the best approach. First off, the whole point of why I built laterstars was that I was dissatisfied with the other services and that I got most of my links from Twitter anyways… keeping those other services around, even just as a conduit, wasn’t something I really wanted to manage. Secondly, things just didn’t really map right to the laterstars format. Every link on laterstars originated from a tweet that someone else created, and you can always view that tweet to get the context of why you thought it looked interesting in the first place. Shoving random links into your inbox without that context just wouldn’t really work. Finally, it would cause a lot of work and rejiggering in the background of the site… which means it would really have to be worth it.

I wanted to gauge what everyone else thought, so I tweeted a quick little poll about it.

Overall, the response was that people either wanted a laterstars bookmarklet for adding stuff directly, or nothing at all, just stick with twitter faves. That at least let me know I was probably right about not wanting to move forward with the added complexity of pulling in from more sources… but I still wanted to be able to add random links here and there. Then, inspiration struck.

The best of both worlds would be to somehow combine a laterstars-specific bookmarklet for adding random links while still sticking to the Twitter universe… but how? Well, after thinking for a bit, I realized that while lots of pages I randomly browse to have never appeared in my Twitter stream from the couple hundred people I follow, there was a good chance that at least one of the millions of Twitter users all over the world has. If the bookmarklet could find those tweets, it could simply let me fave one of them, which would put it into my laterstars inbox just like as if I’d faved it from one of my followers.

Of course, there’s also a decent chance that the link has never been tweeted, so what would the fallback be? Well, since Twitter is pretty much the One True Way to get links into your laterstars inbox, why not just have the bookmark give you the opportunity to tweet it yourself and then autofave it so it shows up in your inbox? Assuming the link is somewhat interesting, chances are that your followers wouldn’t mind checking it out as well… that’s kind of the whole point of what we’re about.

However, if it’s really something that you don’t want to tweet, then I could just give you links to boring old pinboard and delicious right there… yawn.

So I spent the last couple days bringing this to reality. The first issue I ran into, though, was finding the tweets with the page links in them. I knew they were there, but since everyone uses url shorteners on Twitter, it was pretty much impossible to search for the actual urls… crap. Then I remembered the other day when we went to have beers at 21A the other day, there was this dude Brian who worked at a place called Topsy. Apparently they do Twitter search. So, I checked out their site and saw that they were awesome and did exactly what I needed - searching for a url and getting back all the tweets it knew about with that link in it, shortened or not. Awesome.

So really long story short, the bookmarklet is just about done and I think it’s pretty killer. Here are some preview screenshots.

The Bookmarklet

Bonus: on Safari, you can just click cmd-1 (or whatever number of its position) and it’ll fire.

The Window With Results

When Topsy finds tweet with the page’s url in them, we’ll display up to the first 10. Keyboard nav still works, so you can just hit enter right away and it’ll fave the first result and dismiss the window. Or you can navigate the results and fvae the one you want.

Already On Laterstars

If someone has already faved this link on laterstars, you can just copy it over to your account just like if you were browsing someone else’s page.

No One’s Tweeted This?!

On the off chance that no one has tweeted a link to the page, you can just start typing your tweet with the shortened link already in the message ready to go. When you tweet it, it will be autofaved and added to your laterstars inbox just like normal. Or, if you’re embarrassed about the link or something and really don’t want to tweet it, you could just save it to pinboard or delicious… the links will take you to their respective bookmarklet popup forms. But that’s a last resort.

So that’s where things are with the bookmarklet. I’m hoping to get it launched within the next couple days to let you all start playing with it. I’m pretty excited about it though, I think it’s going to be a pretty awesome way to discover and share new stuff, and it will definitely be one step closer to my desire to have laterstars be my One True Place for all my links. Let me know what you think!