You Didn’t Know You Needed: Pocket
Links.
They’re everywhere.
I have a bookmark bar full of them. Full of folders of links to something I thought was important at some point. Articles I haven’t yet read. Recipes I haven’t tried. Curated lists of “Rookies to Watch in 2014” from a Fantasy Football emergency research session right before a draft three years ago.
And they’re a mess. No rhyme or reason. Nothing.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve tried to organize them. But inevitably before I can neatly arrange all the links I want to get to on that Someday of Somedays, my computer needs to reboot, or I have to switch to my work computer, or any of an endless list of reasons why I shrug my shoulders and click “Bookmark All Tabs” knowing full well that I’ll never go back to the folder they’re saved in — much less be able to find the damn thing.
And then one day … I discovered Pocket.
I don’t remember how. Or when. Or where. But I discovered it. (In that way that Columbus “discovered” America. What I mean is that I was made aware of a really cool digital tool that others had created and been using long before me.)
Pocket is a link-saving and link-organizing tool.
There’s a handy little extension for Chrome that puts a small “pocket” icon in your browser, and whenever you come across a link you want to save, you click it. The icon turns red, meaning you’ve saved the link to your Pocket account. It’s easy to use and really convenient.
Saving a link means that when you go to your Pocket page, you’ll see it at the top of a list of links you’ve added.
But simply collecting your links and saving them in a safe (and searchable) space isn’t the end of Pocket’s usefulness. You can tag them. You can attach metadata to the link and easily organize, sort, and find links when you want them. You can create as many tags as you want, whatever you want.
Need to find that article on different kinds of intelligence you read sometime last year?
No problem.
Want to search through all the articles or links you’ve collected on post-modernism in the hopes you’ll find something of use for that paper you’re writing?
Skim away.
You can do like I do, and once I’ve finished reading an article, Archive it. That makes it disappear from your main page, but it’s still accessible via your tags.
You find an article you really love, one you think everyone should read? Mark it as a Favorite using the star icon.
Find a paragraph you really, really like? The kind that sticks with you over the next few days as you go about your business?
Share it.
You can share it to your profile, to your Twitter or Facebook accounts, via email. You can also annotate the excerpt, add in a little note about why it resonated with you, or simply adding a big “AGREED” when you need to.
Don’t worry, your friends will LOVE all the new informative links coming their way.
But perhaps the best feature about Pocket is how you can read the links you’ve saved.
Pocket loads them within its own framework. And while sometimes this means that there are issues with content missing, especially if there’s an ad or image in the middle of the text on the original page, most of the time, it works perfectly. No pesky pop-up ads, no “Scroll past to keep reading” frames, no videos or audio files that are set to auto-play.
It’s as if they copied Apple’s “Reader Mode” (a life-saver on mobile, let me tell you) and incorporated it into their architecture.
And if you want to see the original page? Easy peasy — there’s a “View Original” link at the top of every page you load.
Lastly, Pocket isn’t just a browser application. It has apps for iOS and Android, it has extensions for all the major browsers. It integrates with many other applications, allowing you to save links directly from Twitter, or Flipboard, or Pulse, or import from other services like Instapaper or Delicious.
And don’t get me started on their “Recommended” or “Explore” features. Like Medium, they curate popular articles under a red “best of” tag, and suggest articles you might like or be interested in based on ones you’ve saved to your account. I barely have time to read the ones I come across and add, but I can’t stop searching for new and interesting articles to read.
Pocket is honestly one of the best things I’ve ever stumbled across.
You should try it.
ASAP.
