The wake of the Delicious debacle has been very fruitful for a few other services that occupy a similar Web curation space. One that popped up in the comments in our original post on Delicious was Trunk.ly, which sounded promising for not only offering to collect the links users share on social networks, but to make them searchable. Saving a bunch of links on “library school” is one thing, but being able to parse them out and subdivide them by search, that is where the beauty of data curation lies.
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Trunk.ly starts off by stating plainly that the nature of bookmarking is changing, that it’s now a “rolling social rumble of retweets, likes, favorites, sharing, commenting and general discussion… whenever you show some interest in a link by taking a social action on it (liking it, tweeting it), Trunk.ly is actively monitoring and sucks that link into your Trunk.”
In a brief chat with CEO Tim Bull and CTO Alex Dong they described their vision for Trunk.ly as a “personal search engine.” Bull says, “We’ve got an aggressive roadmap that’s basically looking at all the ways you can share links with people – we want Trunk.ly to be there capturing those and storing them so you never lose a link again.”
The key difference between Trunk.ly and Delicious is that while tags are still around they are not as central to the service. The links that are imported via your social feeds are indexed inside Trunk.ly, meaning when I recall that I read an article about hamburgers two weeks ago, I can search for “hamburgers” and it’ll pop up! In addition to the search function, it also has a social aspect where users can follow one another and search across other user’s Trunks.
In comparison to a service like Pinboard, another curation app getting substantial buzz that offers similar features, the added bonus for Trunk.ly is not necessarily having to DO something (push a bookmarlet and add tags or descriptions) for it to grab links. After you connect whatever services you want to curate, Trunk.ly sucks the links in, there for your searching and referencing pleasure.
Trunk.ly actually launched much earlier than planned in response to the vacuum left by the probably loss of Delicious, and as of today, it’s currently revamping its service, adding servers and features, to account for the flood of traffic. They have plans to connect with other social services like Digg and StumbleUpon, open their API, and add RSS functionality, Chrome extensions and more. For a project that has only been in the works since October, and one that launched under the gun, these ambitions seem pretty, pretty plausible.
How does Trunk.ly compare with other curation Web apps? What experiences do you want or need from a bookmarking service?
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