marks.dk
Why Laterstars is changing the way I read tweets
I use Twitter’s “Favorite”-feature a lot.
Actually, I’ve faved almost 4000 tweets within the last 8 months or so. Almost all of them are faved while reading tweets on the iPhone, because I wanted to check out a link once I’d be back at my laptop.
In the beginning, I read the faved tweets online, but found out that it was a great idea to put a feed of favorites in Google Reader. That’s the way I have been reading faved tweets for months.
Recently, however, people have started tweeting about a service called “Laterstars“. It’s built for people like me who don’t fave because it’s just a great tweet (like this), but because the link in the tweet seems interesting and I want to read it later (like this).
The main advantage in Laterstars is that it strips away the content and present you with easy access to the link in the tweet. You can use the keyboard shortcuts you know from Gmail on the website. It works with Fluid as well, so you get badges, nice favicon etc.
If you subscribe to the atom-feed connected to your profile (here’s mine), you can add it to Google Reader and the title of the item will link to the url found in the faved tweet. Clever!
And it gets even better. Yesterday, the developer, Toby Sterrett, agreed to hear me out about a feature I’d love to see; a bookmarklet that lets you cycle through the links from your faved tweets. And lo and behold; it took him five minutes to make it.
Adding “http://laterstars.com/faved_links/oldest” to your bookmark bar will give you easy access to the links you saved for later, without even visiting laterstars.com. Once you’ve visited a site, it’ll automatically archive the link as well so you don’t visit the same link twice.
If you want to try out Laterstars, here’s a code for the fastest 25 people: MARKS