• Scrapbook – Firefox extension for archiving a web page to your computer only
• Google Notebook – application for clipping sections of content into a notebook, where you can group similar content
• Diigo (I previously used Furl ) – social bookmarking application that allows you to clip content and archive online copy of full content

• Delicious – the social bookmarking application that i’ve used the longest. I have Diigo post a copy of each bookmark to del.icio.us
• Google Docs – web based word processor that can also publish to a blog
• WordPress – open source blogging engine
• Clipmarks – similar to Diggo, with a touch of Google Notebook, it allows you to clip content easier from a page and share it via a blog or email.
• Google Reader – very close to being the best RSS reader
• Feed Demon – passable desktop RSS reader for windows that syncs with newgator service, and Net News Wire
• Net News Wire – my favorite Mac feed reader (see review here )
• ecto – my favorite desktop blog editor
• Gmail – my favorite email client, and one that can be used to store practically anything (aka CRM, storage, Task Manager )
• Gmail This! – a bookmarklet that clips a link and selected content directly into a new gmail message

• Send via SMS – a button on certain services that allows you to SMS data to yourself or others (Hopstop and Google Maps do this too)

At some point I touch every one of these applications. Whether its just reading RSS feeds, publishing blog posts, or trying to capture useful information for later. This drives me nuts! Some days I use diigo, others I use google notebook, and then with some articles I clip content for offline use, so I use Scrapbook.

There always seems to be exceptions for each piece of software. There’s always some small reason that I can’t use it, so then I have to go find another. Diigo limits how much you can clip and won’t archive password protected information. Google Notebook becomes hard to manage once you have over 20 or so notebooks. Google Docs doesn’t fully integrate with WordPress. Google reader is great for reading feeds, but terrible at organizing them into folders. Clipmarks is similar to Google Notebook and to Diigo, but lets you clip more content from different parts of a page. You get the idea.

The point is: There is a workflow to processing information, and there are only a limited set of actions that you can take at any point in time. The process has been stewing in my mind for months, and now i’d like to map this out, and see why no one has yet come up with the ultimate solution.

Over time Facebook has become a great address book, even better than the alumni directory for my university. Whenever I want to get in touch with someone, I can simply click and message them directly from Facebook. That person gets an email notifying them that they’ve received a Facebook message and that they can log in to read it. The problem here being that Facebook is essentially duplicating e-mail within their own system. Kudos to them for doing this so successfully, and getting so many of their users to use it. I would venture to bet that even some of their users use Facebook messaging more than they use their e-mail, and I am being forced to join in on this.

The question I have is does it make sense to use Facebook instead of e-mail? I understand why Facebook has this service, and why Facebook does not let people export their contacts. It simply drives up the usage of their service. But for people who manage everything out of their e-mail accounts (gmail), this is extremely frustrating, especially since you can’t even copy and paste people’s e-mails from their Facebook profiles.

Over time my Facebook social network continues to grow, and slowly capture even the most obscure people from my past. It is a slow manual migration from messaging people directly from Facebook ( because for a one off message its just easier) to getting that person’s e-mail into my Gmail account. Once that person is in my Gmail account, I don’t need to go to Facebook anymore. The separation of my address book and my messaging is frustrating. This Facebook become more like gmail? or does my Gmail (or firefox for that matter) become more like Facebook?

Apparently Fred feels the same.

All of the bookmarklets where too slow to tag on the fly, so i moved to using Pukka. This took care of the speed issues, and I was able to tag more material faster, and to multiple different accounts.

The big problems began when it came time for retrieving information from my database. When I’m looking for “that article that one guy wrote about that one thing that one time?” Then I can barely remember a tag or two, so what I really need is a fast way to scan through all of the bookmarks containing certain tags. I tried cocoalicious and delicious director, which where closer to what I wanted, but still not quite fast or flexible enough.

Then after another one of my rant’s about how delicious addressed the user’s selfish needs for better bookmarking first, before trying to sell the user’s on the social aspects, I decided I wanted to track down the blog post where I had originally read the idea. After a couple minutes of frustrating search through my delicious account, I decided to call for help. I went to the research machine. The guru of efficiently consuming and archiving data across the web. Rob Finn, of Ventureblogalist.

So, using gmail, I sent him an e-mail that went a little something like this:

Me:

Rob,

Quick question about an article we talked about during tech crunch. I was talking about delicious, and how you needed to have a service that speaks to a users selfish needs first before you sell them on the social aspects. AKA, the hook, the service needs to be useful on its own because people don’t go to delicious to share, they go to have a better way to manage their bookmarks, the social benefits were just an side effect.

Anyway, I’m trying to track downt he article that first said all of that. Any idea where it was?

Then His reply a few seconds later:

http://bokardo.com/archives/learning-more-about-structured-blogging/

How did he find it so fast!! He certainly didn’t use delicious. Well, I’ll attempt to get to the point. It turns out he had set up Google Co-op’s Custom Search Engine to search through all of the blogs he reads. As with me, most of the articles/links that get tagged into delicious probably came from these feeds, so its a safe bet that the Google Co-op search will turn up what you were looking for.

Sure enough. Search for two words “delicious” and “selfish”, and you get the Bokardo article as the first result! Hmmm, maybe that’s why Google is a verb. I love finding what I need with a few keystrokes.

Thanks for the great tip Rob. Google Co-op based on my feeds can be found below. I’m sure none of this is totally new or original, but I just didn’t have the time, energy, or brains to put this together sooner.

Rob over at Ventureblogalist continues to turn out high quality posts about the VC world, and this time he comes up with a very creative use of diggo.

Basically by creating a bookmark in diggo for each Venture Capital firm that he finds, and then using the diggo comments section to store information about their portfolio companies, he has created an online database of VC firms that he can refer deals to. The objective being to build goodwill with other VC firms and entrepreneurs by successfully making matches.

Glad to see some other people out there blogging about CRM and Social Bookmarking. In my opinion both markets are fairly immature. CRM has not seen many advances, other than a shift of the same old concepts to the web, in quite some time. Social Bookmarking on the other hand is the new kid on the block, but it seems to be struggling to find more serious applications than del.icio.us (which I use almost everday, albeit with limited success). This creative use of diggo as a mild CRM/Referral Relationship Manager just goes to show there are plenty of other applications for social bookmarking and that the CRM market is still under served.