If you’ve ever lost a link you’ve shared or saved then Trunk.ly could be the answer. Released from beta early in response to Yahoo’s planned divestment of Delicious, the site offers an easy way to keep track of what you’ve shared on the social web. The founders say:
“By connecting into your social networks, Trunk.ly monitors and collects the links that you find interesting across the social web. More importantly, it indexes the web pages these links point to and builds a personal search engine, so you never have to tag or describe a link again, you just search and Trunk.ly will find it again for you.”
Sounds good, but how does it work? It took just seconds to get a Trunk.ly account and start setting it up. The site has the usual profile features and you can make the links you share private. You also get an API key, which might come in handy when using Trunk.ly with other sites. For example, we at 123 neon signs plan to use it to allow visitors to save the products they are interested in – in one place.
Connecting Services
Next, it was time to connect some services. Trunk.ly works with Twitter (including private Twitter profiles) and Facebook (for which it needs offline access), and you can also import bookmarks from Delicious and Pinboard. Even better, it works with RSS and Atom feeds, so you can import your WordPress blog, your Google Reader subscriptions as well as feeds from Instapaper, Tumblr and Posterous. After a few minutes the links you have shared are imported and displayed on your Trunk.ly home page, with tabs for each date, favicons for the sites, as well as a number indicating how many other users have shared the same link. You can also follow your Twitter friends in Trunk.ly and their saves will appear in the timeline tab.
Trunk.ly Tools
Other great tools, include the save to Trunk.ly bookmarklet, a button (similar to the mini Tweetmeme button) so that people can save your blog content, a blog widget, one key search for Firefox and Chrome and the ability to export all your links.
Testing The Search
So, how else can you search those links? By using the tags page to click on the tags that apply to your content. Trunk.ly harvests these automatically, so there’s no setup work to do here. Click on a tag and keep scrolling to see all the links you have shared. In our test, the data in our largest category went back to December 2009. You can also use the search box at the top of the home page for a lightning quick search of your links.
Trunk.ly looks to be a great tool, though it would be good to be able to distinguish between links to different types of media. However, development is ongoing, with recent updates including a Chrome extension, a WordPress widget, a design upgrade, improved processing of RSS, a better follower interface and a like button for shared links. This will be a great tool for prolific bloggers to keep track of all their stuff, too and is certainly worth watching
Guest Bio: This post was written by Lior Levin, a marketing preacher at 123 neon signs, a well known neon signs store.
