4 Social Bookmarklets That Go Above and Beyond

Bookmarklets are neat little tools that people often forget about. They usually do short and quick tasks like adding a web page to your favorites or to a social bookmarking site. Even though most bookmarklets are simple, the possibilities are practically endless. So, I wanted to point out a few that go above and beyond and, may just become a tool that you cannot live without.

Bit.ly Sidebar

Bit.ly is a URL shortener that is growing in popularity and happens to be one of my favorites. It actually has two different bookmarklets that you can use: shorten with bit.ly and bit.ly sidebar. Although the “shorten with bit.ly” bookmarklet does come in handy, it’s the bit.ly sidebar that really impresses.

As you can see from the screenshot to the left, it not only gives you a shortened URL but, if this URL has been previously shortened with bit.ly it will even show you how many total clicks the link has.

You can also view conversations on different social media sites for that particular URL. Lastly, you can also send the shortened URL to an email address, Gmail, Facebook and/or Twitter.

The bookmarklet can be found on the right side of the Bit.ly homepage.

Kwout

Kwout is “a brilliant way to quote” and a great bookmarklet for bloggers. Kwout is a service that lets you quote a part of any web page as an image or image map. There is a Firefox addon that works great but if you don’t use Firefox, the bookmarklet is a nice alternative.

Clicking the Kwout bookmarklet will open up the web page in a Kwout enabled window that then allows you to select an area that you wish to quote from that page. You simple highlight a section that you’d like to quote and then click on “cut out” to get your image.

Once you get your final image, there are many options as far as how and where you’d like to post it, changing the size, and other customizations.

The bookmarklet can be found at the bottom of the Kwout homepage.

Diigolet

Diigolet is a nice little toolbar alternative for Diigo. They call it a “super bookmarklet” since it lets you do much more than just bookmark web pages. With Diigolet you can highlight, create floating sticky notes, add comments and do more to web pages.

What’s nice about Diigolet is that no matter how many annotations you add to a web page, it will remain on the page even after you close it out. Simply load the page whenever you like, click on the Diigolet bookmarklet, login if needed, and you’ll see all of your saved highlights, sticky notes, etc.

BigTweet

There are a few Twitter bookmarklets floating around but BigTweet is the most advanced one that I’ve seen thus far. First of all, it lets you send the current web page you’re browsing to either Twitter or FriendFeed  – all without having to leave the page you’re on.

As you can see from the screenshot below, there are numerous options with BigTweet. You can control the text and even add special characters to your updates. You can choose to either add the full (long) URL or the short URL to your update. You can even link your Bit.ly account so that you can track all of your URLs shared with BigTweet.

You can customize the page title and the highlighted text (if you selected text before clicking the bookmarklet). You can even chose to post in “240 char mode”, meaning you can go beyond the 140 character limit and your tweet will be split into two.

Which bookmarklet(s) do you use and which one(s) are your favorite?

Written by Charnita Fance from Social Web Tools
Posted on May 15th, 2009 and filed under Social Media
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