Saving Links Through IM with Meshly
Meshly is not really like Twitter; it is not really like del.icio.us; and it is not really like digg. But comparisons to all three are fair when trying to figure out just what exactly Meshly actually is. Like Twitter, Meshly is an instant blogging application, like del.icio.us it is about saving links, and it has a voting component that closely resembles digg.
The best way to describe Meshly is as an instant messenger based bookmarking tool. Using either MSN, AIM, or GTalk instant messengers, users post, tag, and describe links to Meshly. The entire sign up process is done via instant messenger, and is pretty painless. Once links are posted to the site, people vote on them digg-style so the best each day, week, and month are highlighted. Users can comment on the links via the site, or browse by tag like on del.icio.us.
Meshly also lets users create a personal "channel," if they so desire. Channels are sort of like a personal tag for all of your links that lets people watch, discuss, and vote on links you add them. Any channel or tag can be made into a widget that you can embed into your website.
Adding a link to Meshly goes something like this:
User: post
meshly: adding a new post. type cancel at any time to quit.please enter the url for the link
User: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/the_expansion_of_social_networks.php
meshly: enter a title for the link
User: The Expansion of Social Networks
meshly: enter a brief description of the link
User: Alex Iskold looks at how social networks will expand into niche verticals and what that means for everyone (general social networks and niche ones alike).
meshly: enter post tags (keywords) seperated by spaces (example: funny tech robots)
User: web2.0 socialnetworks vertical iskold readwriteweb
meshly: what channel(s) should i submit your post to?
enter 1 or more channel names seperated by a space. if the channel doesn't exist, a new channel will be created.
post to general if you don't know where to place this post.
(example: general yourblogname scienceinterest)
User: web2.0
meshly: about to post:
The Expansion of Social Networks
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/the_expansion_of_social_networks.php
Alex Iskold looks at how social networks will expand into niche verticals and what that means for everyone (general social networks and niche ones alike).
filed under: web2.0 socialnetworks vertical iskold readwriteweb
posted to: web2.0
okay? (y/n)
User: y
Conclusion
It would be easy to dismiss Meshly as just another digg or del.icio.us clone with a gimmick (IM posting). But Meshly is well made, if not so polished in presentation, and posting from IM is convenient and should appeal to the Twitter set, who expect instant gratification. Their widget is a very clever addition, that allows people to create a link blog without really having to do any work, and could help spread the site. See a cool link? IM Meshly and it gets posted to your widget automatically.
There is a bit of confusion between tags and channels, however -- the two seem redundant to me, and Meshly would also be wise to add a standard bookmarklet so people can add links without going through the IM bot.
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Wow!
This looks like a cool application. Thanks for sharing.
Cheers!
whoa i'd never heard of it ... thanks :)
I still don't fully get the IM angle. Anything you would want to bookmark would already be in your browser window, wouldn't it? So why make us switch out of the browser window in the first place? Why not just build this functionality into a bookmarklet? Oh wait... del.icio.us already has that. And so does Tumblr.
Thanks for passing Meshly along, Josh! We're trying hard to work out some of the messaging still regarding what channels are, because that's really Meshly's core feature.
The dream is to have a link sharing tool that let's communities form more organically. So we want people to be able to create and participate in channels of their own making instead of predefined tech, videos, news, etc. buckets. You can build a channel with your friends at the office, or with your school, or some professional community that you participate in, or for your blog's readers.. or whatever, and voting and moderation can take place within the bounds of that channel/community.
There's tagging, of course, which lets you associate things with particular topics, but topics aren't necessarily communities.
So I can have a group of folks who like to share stuff that might be tagged with things like science and skateboarding and ajax. We can collude to make a channel for our community and share all that good stuff in one place. And we can take the rss feed for that channel and pump it into our feedreaders or a blog or another cool service. Anyone else that stumbles onto our channel and likes what they are reading can participate in the channel too.
The IM interface is something I liked because it's how I share links with people now. Only I have to send an IM to several people, and an email to people who don't use the same IM network... Now I can post to Meshly once and all of my buddies can participate in the same community, and we get a tagged archive of all our finds to boot.
That's the idea anyway. I'm looking forward to seeing how other people use it and getting feedback on the features they want to see. We've really tried to keep things as simple as possible so that folks can use it for whatever purpose suits them.
Where is the URL to the site? It really sucks when someone review about a site without giving a url to that site for the users to see it.
Joseph, the URL is http://www.meshly.com/
I agree on the URL thing, I have been howering my mouse about it for three minutes ....
Sorry about the URL thing, guys. Not sure how that got deleted! Fixed now, though. :)
@soxiam
Bzzster! (http://bzzster.com) is a great one built for the sole purpose to email links to friends.. and works via a bookmarklet.
I'm a hardcore del.icio.us user and twitter user (http://twitter.com/et). I broadcast my delicious links to twitter using twitterfeed.com.
I don't get this app. It seems like it would be much slower to bookmark a link than using the del.icio.us extension in Firefox (which will grab the url for the current page, the title, and prefill the description with any text I've selected). Where is the value from having an IM interface? If I'm submitting pages that means I'm *already* in my web browser?
Does the IM come into play for broadcasting to friends?
Hmmm... Reminds me of Eliza:
user: I'd like to bookmark a link....
eliza: so, you feel like bookmarking something...
user: yes, i think so.
eliza: it sounds to me like you'd like to bookmark something.
user: yes, www.carpaltunnelsyndrome.com.
eliza: so, you'd like to bookmark www.carpaltunnelsyndrome.com?
....
Blogrovr has a drop down on our toolbar menu (just about to be released) to twitter a url and comment, but we're old fashioned, so we're using an actual dialog box with a button :-)