laterstars blog

New One-Click Bookmarklet - Click It And Forget It™

We already have a pretty sweet bookmarklet that searches for all the tweets that link to whatever page you’re on and lets you choose one to fave so it gets imported into your laterstars. I’m still surprised by how many pages I want to save that have already been tweeted at some point, letting me save it with minimal effort. However, the way the existing version works, it still requires some input from you to choose a tweet to fave, or have you tweet it yourself if no one’s ever tweeted it before.

Usually this is fine, and I actually like seeing what tweets are found and choosing the best one to fave. But, like any good entitled and lazy internet user, that’s more effort than I want to exert sometimes. WHY CAN’T I JUST CLICK A FAVE BUTTON AND BE DONE WITH IT!?

Well-meaning enabler that I am, this higher level of laziness is now possible. Introducing the One-Click Fave™ (experimental) bookmarklet, by laterstars:

With this bookmarklet, whenever you want to fave and save a link to your laterstars, just click the button and it gets queued off in the background, letting you continue on your way without having to think at all.

How does it work? It’s a pretty simple process…

1. First we check if the link has already been faved on laterstars. If it has, we copy the first faved link over to your account, as if you copied it from another user’s page.
2. If it doesn’t find the link on laterstars, it fires off a Topsy search for the url. If it finds tweets that link to it, we fave the first one it finds for you and then immediately import that it in.
3. If Topsy doesn’t return anything, we get a bit tricky… we created a new Twitter account at @liwt (which stand for Links I Won’t Tweet). If we reach this step, that account tweets the link for you, and then we fave that tweet and import it into your account.

As you can see, we attribute it to you, so people hopefully don’t get silly and save a bunch of rude links or something.

All these steps happen in the background, so you can just click the bookmarklet on the page and continue on with your business… when you go to your laterstars later on, the links should be there waiting for you. It’s called experimental for now, though, because we’re not sure if it’s going to work 100% of the time since there’s no real human interaction. But, it should work just fine.

Here’s a quick video of the whole process:

Let me know what you think!