Back in January, I wrote about my conundrums relating to information overload, and how I have managed to accumulate over 3500 links to check. Most of these links come from my twitter stream with almost 2000 tweets ‘favourited’ purely to read later.
I have tried chipping away at this backlog but it’s never really made much of a difference. It hasn’t been helped by a slightly buggy experience I have with twitter favourites whereby I check a link I’ve starred previously and when I want to discard the favourite, it doesn’t always work and several favourites remain in my list.
However, several weeks ago, laterstars.com came to my attention. A twitter app that displays your favourites on twitter which contain links. That’s exactly why I favourite tweets, to check the links later. Laterstars also converts all the shortened urls from the likes of bit.ly etc into the full URLs so you know where you are going!
But that’s not all it does. You can uh, favourite your favourites by clicking on the heart icon. You can add tags & archive your links or you can delete them from your link list.
Another nifty feature of Laterstars is that you can also view other peoples favourites. It doesn’t quite work how I thought it might (assuming a stream of links from other people like delicious.com). It works by listing all the users and then you click on each user to view they’re favourites. It does feel quite unintuitive as with an ever-expanding user base, it could become quite overwhelming to find users who may be starring items that I am interested in. There’s no way of seeing a users twitter bio or anything, so I don’t know whether I’m checking out a list of links relating to web design or horse grooming.
What I would like to see is other people who have favourited the same links as I have. I agree that this would create even more avenues for me to hoard links & never get round to checking them all, but at least it would introduce a social element to laterstars and add to the existing ability of following other peoples links.
I love the design of Laterstars though, it’s rather pleasing to the eye & has some lovely UI elements dotted around.
Laterstars is still in beta so you’ll have to snag yourself an invite code should you want in on the action but I’d definitely recommend it (check out @laterstars for invites).
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takeo | Mar 20, 05:30 PM | Permalink
Hey Anthony, nice writeup! Glad it’s helping you out so far. As far as the social aspect goes, I have tons of ideas for that, just haven’t had a chance to work in them yet… lusting the other users was very quick and easy to get going so I did that in the meantime, but you’re right, there are lots of things that could be done with figuring out other people who fave a lot if the same links as you, recommendations, etc. We’re pretty close to finishing up subscriptions, where you can subscribe to people you think fave good stuff so you can go right to their links and copy them over. Lots more to come!
takeo | Mar 20, 05:32 PM | Permalink
That was meant to say “listing users” not “lusting users” – dang iPhone!
MrQwest | Mar 20, 07:22 PM | Permalink
Hey Takeo, thanks for taking the time to swing by comment.
After reading part 1 of your RSS: You’re Dead To Me post, I can relate to every single thing you’ve said so far, laterstars has been a revelation to me.
I’ve enjoyed using it alot so far, and it will remain in my tool kit for a fair while yet!
Keep up the good work!