Siphs : link blogging and sharing
I posted about Siphs a while ago and compared it to link sharing sites like ShareThis.
The basic premise was a way to share links without having to use email, ShareThis and now Siphs have made this easier by a bookmarklet. Import your contact list and whenever you come across a web page you want to share/send to friends click the bookmarklet and select your contacts and hit send (or type in an email address that is not in your contacts list).
Unlike ShareThis, you can’t send links to as a social network private message or via IM.
Your admin area lists all the webpages you have shared and with whom you have shared them.
A post on the Siphs blog explains how much easier and centralised link sharing is with Siphs.
Now Siphs has grown and link sharing is now just one of many features, moreso it has grown into a full blown link blog.
Basically you send links to friends via a bookmarklet, you can add a comment to the link, tag it, and choose to make it public.
All these public links you have shared are archived in a public annotated link blog, and you can even spice up the sidebar, and people can add comments to posts, search your posts….what’s next!
On top of that you can get links you share to automatically post to Twitter and Jaiku.
Here is an example Siphs link blog.
Just for fun the front page has a stream of the lastest links from all users, clicking on a link takes you to the native webpage, but you can’t link back to a users link blog to see if they annotated this link, and to see if people left comments.
Hot posts
What I’d like to see is a stream of the lastest shared links by date and by popularity.
For every link on the front page they could have a hyperlink to the people who have shared this link.
So if 5 Siph users have shared this link, you could click to each users Siph blog. Also instead of clicking to each blog, from the link on the front page we could expand a drop down to to see aggregated annotated notes (these are notes each Siph user added when they shared the link) and aggregated visitor comments.
Also if lots of Siph users have shared this link, then this link could appear on a popular link stream.
So this means lost of people would be visiting the Siphs homepage, and maybe these links can be rated and commented on in general.
Since Siph users tag their posts, we could see the latest posts via a tag cloud.
Kind of starting to sound like Digg…but Siphs isn’t a social network which is the new direction of Digg.
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First thanks for the excellent post about our updates to the Siphs service. In addition to the many features covered, the Link Blog also comes with its own RSS feed and javascript widget. We added this feature so other individuals could follow another user’s Siphs link blog without having to visit the blog itself.
We also wholeheartedly agree about making the site, and specifically the homepage, more social! We have not introduced social tools yet because of our belief that the personal, individual benefits of using the site precede social value. So as the site grows, we’ll slowly but surely introduce some neat features.
Regarding the homepage, we are working on improvements that would let you click back to the poster’s link blog. The current design reflects the fact that both “publicly” and “privately” shared links appear on the homepage, and to preserve anonymity we do not display the username or associated comments. Suffice to say, we’re working on it and should have it out in a couple of weeks.
That said, what sort of API calls do you think we could introduce to make the data more accessible and usable? We would like to introduce an API in the future would love to get your input on what you consider to be important, and interesting functionality.
Thanks again!
Comment by Arpan — September 21, 2007 @ 4:14 pm