Links to the Wind

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Pinboard.in is well known for being an anti-social bookmarking service. The addition of default private bookmarks is inline with that philosophy and I think it’s a great idea. About half of my 10,000 bookmarks are private. The other half, I make public to anyone that is bored enough to look through them.

Sharing on Twitter

A good amount of stuff I read, I post on Twitter. I usually find interesting material through Zite and the iOS app makes it easy to share on Twitter. But this is material I actually read because it’s in an app that I use for reading. The links are pretty evenly split between Technology, Beer, and Science.

Instapaper

I don’t “Like” very many things in Instapaper anymore. The things I do “Like” in Instapaper go to Pinboard automatically. Just read my Pinboard if you’re interested.

Google Reader

I “star” quite a few things in Google Reader. These are usually things I want to read or followup on later. While I could Tweet these links, I don’t like to. Since many times I have not read the article, it feels a little crappy to push it out to Twitter. “Here’s this thing that may be of no interest. Take a look”.

These links are automatically added to Pinboard by an IFTTT rule. They are tagged “gstar”

Of course Google finally “finished” Google Reader and now it’s being put to death this summer. I’ve switched back to Fever Reader for now and have the same IFTTT rules running.

Macdrifter

This is the cream for me. It takes a good deal more effort to post than to tweet. I also treat Macdrifter as my personal log of interesting stuff. The links on Macdrifter are the kinds of links I would actually send directly to a friend.1 I also add more context and exposition to these links so it’s less of a random bag of internet junk than my Pinboard bookmarks. Everything that goes on Macdrifter is automatically archived to Pinboard for me and tagged “blog”. The full article content is added to the bookmark and all tags for the post are preserved as well. It’s a really nice little archive of this site.

Conclusion

Pinboard has become a subsidiary of Macdrifter. Or maybe it’s the other way around. I share public bookmarks because I think it makes Pinboard better. I also think it’s interesting to browse the bookmarks of internet acquaintances so I feel compelled to do the same. Search has ruined discovery on the internet. I miss the old days of Yahoo and browsing indexes of awesome new stuff. Pinboard provides that same thing now.

  1. Except, you know, that’s really annoying. ↩︎