laterstars blog

account tab comes alive

Up until now, the only thing the account tab has been good for is logging in and out. There were some coming soon items in there for a while that didn’t do anything when you clicked as well, just holding a place for the real deal. Well no more. Let’ start from the top.

Invite Friends

We’ve given all users an invitation to send to a friend. Yeah, just one for now. Some of you have already noticed and used it, but for those of you who haven’t, just click it and you’ll get an invitation form:

Just fill out your friend’s Twitter screen name and hit send and you’ll send them a public @ message with a link to their activation page. No you can’t do a custom message just yet, still need to finish that up. We’ll be replenishing your invitation stock over time as we can handle more people.

Bookmarklets

As I wrote in the other article, I’ve been working on a laterstars specific bookmarklet that lets you add any page on the web that you come across, while still staying true to our focus on only grabbing links from Twitter faves. Check out the other article for a more detailed overview on how it works.

Aside from the main bookmarklet, we also have a few more available on the new bookmarklets page:

This one’s been covered.

Just a simple link to your laterstars inbox.

This one takes you to the oldest unread link you have. As long as you’re logged in, you’ll just go directly to the page. Once you’re done reading it, you can click it again and you’ll be taken directly to the next oldest in line. Click it again, etc. It’s a pretty cool way to just cycle through all your oldest stuff in a casual way. Give it a try.

Similar to the oldest link bookmarklet, this one just takes you to a random unread link. You can similar cycle through lots of random links this way, and since they’re all marked read as you view them, you’ll never see the same page twice. Again, a pretty cool way to clear out old unread links. Both of these were inspired by pinboard’s similar bookmarklets and were suggested by @marks. I’d never used them on pinboard and was skeptical, but after speaking with Mark and trying them for myself I became convinced.

Settings

Finally, we’ve begun the process of adding a few personalized settings to the app. We started with giving you control over how you want your Twitter favorites to be handled. Initially, the only time we touched your Twitter faves as by deleting them when you deleted a link on laterstars. The thinking is that even though we’re kind of overloading the whole concept of Twitter favorites by using them as “bookmarks” of sorts, it’s still nice to keep them somewhat clean and representative of what you like. So, if you starred a Tweet to save a link and you ended up not caring about the page it went to, deleting it from laterstars probably meant that you didn’t consider it a “favorite” on Twitter either, so we got rid of it automatically.

While this is probably fine for most people, we thought we should probably give you the choice of how this should be handled, so that we start out as just a read-only faves consumer, and you can adjust how you want things to be removed, if at all. So you can now choose:

The initial setting is now “never” - we’ll never touch your faves. I have mine set to the old behavior of deleting after I delete a laterstars link. The other options are pretty self-explanatory:

After archiving: we’ll delete the associated Twitter fave after you archive a link or delete it.

After reading: we’ll delete the associated Twitter fave after you read a link or delete it.

And for the hardcore, after importing: we’ll delete the associated Twitter fave after we import a link. This means that you’ll basically not have any faves on Twitter with links in them. We have this available for the people who enjoy faving Tweets that they think are funny and like to keep them very clean for that reason, but would also like to bookmark some links.