Then after a few days, I thought to myself “isn’t this a lot like that tumblr thing all my tech friends are using?”

So I talked to them about the differences, and the general response was that Tumblr was more social, so I setup an account on Tumblr as well.

Then because I was too lazy to thouroughly test out both platforms, I just decided I’d send my blog post via email to both services, so I could get comfortable actively using both platform and seeing the results.  The posterous account seemed like a great place to point my non-nerdy non-techy friends, and tumblr would be a place where I could keep up on the tech discussions, since thats where the tech audience already set up camp.

Here they are running side (posterous) by side (tumblr)

Posterous:

Tumblr:

As you can see, they look nothing alike. It turned out there was some major differences.  Here they are:

1) Tumblr is more social. All my nerdy friends are already using it, so the dashboard of tumblr blogs i follow is already full of interesting content, and conversations for me to add to.

2) Posterous handles full content posts with an image as well as multiple images.  Tumblr doesn’t do this all that well.

3) Posterous really works without ever really having to go to visit the site.  Tumblr tends to be more useful when you go visit the site and use it.

Nice fun comparison. I probably wouldn’t use Tumblr to communicate with my non tech friends.  Now that the comparison experiment’s over I just post whatever I want to each!

After a few minutes of using the UI I realized a core feature had changed for the worst, assigning categories to transactions.

Its used to have a popup that contained all the transactions, and you could quickly find the one that you wanted. Categorizing a long list of transactions was relatively simple and fast. Here’s that list:

The new version of this is a drop-down that you have to mouse-over to find the subcategories. Its a real pain, and put a serious dent in me keeping up with my tagging/categorizing. They do have an auto-complete, but its a hassle to tab over to that field, and you can’t just hit the “enter” button to save the tag and go back to your transaction list. Here’s what it looks like now:

The other issue with this is, that you can’t bulk edit the merchant and the category independantly. If you select 20 transactions, and want to make them all a certain category, it changes the Merchant name for all of these transactions to “Multiple Merchants”. I lost some data this way!

Oops, in the making of that screenshot I accidently clicked Save and lost two more Merchant names!

Anyway, Mint.com is still my favorite personal finance application, and I havn’t been searching for a replacement. These small quirks are a big enough pain to think about wesabe or buxfer again.

We have all these bookmarking tools, and we have all these clipping, notebooking, and research tools.  But what are they all used for?

I tend to use them a lot for research on people/companies in my industry, and often times this would be really useful to have directly in my CRM system.

I’d like to see a bookmarklet that lets you clip content, and then associate it directly with a contact or company in your CRM.  Store the notes/articles/clippings right with that particular entity, so that next time I look that person up I’ll know something about them, or have a conversation starter.

Someone needs to build a bookmarklet that lets you highlight contact information, and then with the click of a button send it to the right contact management tool (outlook, highrise, salesforce, etc).

I hate copying and pasting over the address, then the phone number, then their name….. the whole time worrying about errors in my data input.

You could highlight text in an email signature in gmail, you could highlight text on people’s websites, and then the bookmarklet would recognize the address, phone number, email, fax, and put them in the right places for that particular contact manager.

Obviously we would love an automated version that just recognized signatures in your inbox (Mac mail may have something like this), but a rapid contact importing tool like this would be the first step.

Here’s what VentureBeat said:

Instead of just saving links, you use Iterasi to save all of the information on a page, including images and links, a process it calls “notarizing.” Log in to your Iterasi account and you can access the actual page. In the future, you’ll also be able to have the site to automatically notarize a page based on a pre-set schedule. You can also search the text within a page (which you can’t do with a screenshot image).

Eventually there will be one tool that grabs everything you read, lets you tag it, lets you hightlight certain clips, stores archives of everything, and makes it completely searchable online and offline! It might be a small startup like Iterasi, or it might end up being Google with a combination of products like Google Notebook, Google Co-op, and Google Web History

1. I save Links
2. I save/archive the full or partial content of articles/posts/etc
   
3. I save specific clips of content within a page
   
4. I save certain clips of content along with remarks to be publish on my blog
   
5. I save things to send to my phone via sms
6. I save clips of content that I want to email to people
7. I save multiple pieces of content around a specific topic or multiple clips pertaining to one topic

Any of these things I save, I always want the ability to choose whether it is private, public, or shared to a restricted group of users. AND I don’t want them to have to have an account on the same service in order to see this information I’m sharing.

Private – just for me
Public – for everyone
Restricted Group -just a list of users I choose.

Now, how do I currently save each of these information types:

1. I save Links
   • Delicious, Diigo, Gmail
2. I save/archive the full or partial content of articles/posts/etc
   • Diigo, Scrapbook, Notebook, Clipmarks
3. I save specific clips of content within a page
   • Google Notebook, Clipmarks, Diigo
4. I save certain clips of content along with remarks to be publish on my blog
   • Diigo, Clipmarks, WordPress
     
5. I save things to send to my phone via sms
   • “Send via SMS”, Google SMS
6. I save clips of content that I want to email to people
   • “Gmail This”, Diggo, Clipmarks, Google Notebook
7. I save multiple pieces of content around a specific topic or multiple clips pertaining to one topic
   • Google Notebook
     

As you can see, there is a relatively concise grouping of types of data, but the choices for where I can store this data are rather mind boggling. I would like to reduce that clutter, and in further posts will try to propose a solution.

I don’t even know what to call this category of application!! How am I ever going to find the “Last.fm” or “del.icio.us” of reading applications?

I really focused on 3 things
1) how do they let you tag the books (tagging, categorizing, bookshelves)
2) how many people were using it
3) how easy it was for me to add my friends


New sites to review

http://www.goodreads.com/
- traffic? (couldnt tell fight club because of tagging)
- funky taggin
- offers rss feed subscription updates

http://www.bookjetty.com/
- wanted, reading, read
- doesn’t look like too many people on it (5 for fight club)

http://www.allconsuming.net/
- 677 fight club
- I intend to consume this, I am consuming this now, i have consumed this
- not great detail on feedback (wish washy, worth consuming, not worth consuming)
- does food

http://www.bookbump.com/

http://reader2.com/

http://www.booktagger.com/
- clunky UI
- can only have book in 1 category at a time
- currently reading, books i want to buy, i have read, i own, i want to read, i have borowed, i have lent

http://www.22books.com/


Old Sites from my first review

http://www.librarything.com/
-simple
- 4,800 for fight club, so getting mass
- tagging

http://www.gurulib.com/
- fast search!
- can create your own shelves


http://lib.rario.us/
- didnt have a “i forgot my password”

http://www.listal.com/
- suprisingly tough to use
- 170 for flight club

http://www.shelfari.com/
-annoying emails
- easy to add books to shelf
- cheesy graphics
- handles classifying books well
- cant review it till you’ve read it
-3,800 fight club

http://squirl.info/