5 Twitter Bookmarking Apps

If you’re like me, you find lots of great content online every day that ends up being fodder for Twitter. It can be hard to keep track of what you tweet much less the links you send out. Favoriting a link makes it easy to find later, but if you favorite a lot of links, it can be hard to find older links. If you want to tag your favorites, well forget that. Or how about searching other people’s favorites? Impossible at the moment. These frustrations sent me on a search for the best bookmarking Twitter tool. It turns out there are many more with a wider variety of features than I imagined.

I sat down with my co-workers and created a wish-list of qualities that we as marketing people want in a Twitter bookmarking tool. As usual, all the tools have to be free and not require a download. Beyond that, we wanted to be able to:

• have an easy-to-use interface
• get the hang of it quickly
• send updates to Twitter and other sites
• easily configure it
• shorten URLs, preferably with the ability to choose the URL shortening tool
• use analytics
• save links
• tag or categorize links
• link to other social media sites
• search through the collection of bookmarks

The evaluation method was simple. I visited each site and registered. After my profile loaded, I took a screenshot of the interface and then spent about ten minutes looking around the site. A decent site should be able to explain itself in that time. After using the application, I rated each site against my wish list.

 

Twitthat is a basic bookmarking site. It allows you to install a button on your browser’s toolbar and post any link from any website. It’s as base as you can get. It does store your links, but doesn’t allow you to search or tag them for easier retrieval. There is also a public timeline which allows you to see what’s being updated using the site and most read. It also displays the most popular tweets from the site.

PROS: Easy to use toolbar app that allows you to bookmark Twitter links.

CONS: Doesn’t do anything else. It could be much more functional if they added one or two abilities.

RATING: 

Yourversion is a mix between Delicious and a bookmarking tool. This has it all. After creating an account, you add five interests and then select from a pre-determined list of words. From there, you have the ability to add or delete other interests. The site is divided into six sections: discover, bookmarks, thumbed, shared, friends and profile. Discover brings you content based on your interests and you can view all of them or just view news, blogs, webpages, Twitter, videos and products. After you bookmark something, you can view the links and share them on Twitter, Facebook or email. It also lets you thumb up or thumb down content which allows the algorithm to learn your taste and deliver more focused content to you. You can tag bookmarks, browse tags and import your bookmarks from Delicious. It does a lot  more, like giving you a public profile, the ability to import contacts from Gmail and Yahoo and provides a mobile interface. 

PROS: It covers all of our requirements and fills some we didn’t even know we had.

CONS: No analytics so you can’t see your influence.

RATING: 

Sharein is similar to Yourverision with two notable exceptions: it doesn’t bring new content to you and it has impressive analytics. Both sites have the same basic features and interaction and ability, but with Sharein, you can’t tag bookmarks as you save them, which adds another step. The real reason to choose this over Yourversion is the analytics. There is a very useful dashboard that shows retweets, user comments and reshares. By hovering over a link, you can see when it was shared, how many views it had, the reach of the tweet and number of times it was reshared. You can view activity in time intervals of 6 hours, 24 hours, month or a year. It’s the best way I’ve seen to measure your impact and influence.

 

PROS: Most of the features of Yourversion plus amazing analytics make this a great tool.

CONS: If they added the feature where they bring you information and the ability to tag bookmarks as you save them, it would be unstoppable.

RATING: 

   

Tweetmarks is a great idea. Why create a new website when you can modify an existing one. Get all the benefits of del.icio.us with a few extra additions. Tweetmarks will bookmark the links you use in your tweets to Delicious.com. There is no toolbar button or extra step. You can have the site add all links you tweet or just tweets with certain hashtags. 

PROS: Simple to use and works with a site on which you probably already have an account 

CONS: You’re limited to the features of Delicious which doesn’t allow you to post to Facebook or email and doesn’t have any analytics.

RATING:

Mister Wong is a bookmarking site that has released a Twitter app. All you have to do is attach your Twitter profile to your Mister Wong account and it brings in any tweet with a URL attached. The Mister Wong site allows you to make a comment on your bookmarks, tag them, decide to make the link private or public and share it on Twitter. 

PROS: Easy to share and save links. It lets you tag bookmarks, has a searchable database and gives you a public profile.

CONS: I tweeted several links and they never appeared in my profile. From what I can tell, the bookmarking feature through Twitter doesn’t work.

RAITING:

 

 CONCLUSION: This was a tough one to pick. Tweetmarks is great because if you already have a Delicious account, you don’t have to open another bookmarking account. However, Delicious lacks any way to share your bookmarks beyond its service. Sharein is also great. The analytics are beyond anything else I’ve seen but it doesn’t bring new content to you. My pick for this week’s winner is Yourversion. It imports your existing Delicious account (making Delicious redundant), serves up content to you that might be of interest and has a mobile interface. It’s got some great tools that other sites should add to their list of features.

Stefan Halley is the Digital Project Leader for The Duffy Agency. He loves to talk about social media and won't shut up about Twitter.

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