Chris Sacca’s infamous blog post on What Twitter Can Be ranged from topics about its apps, the platform itself, and what Wall Street thinks of the company. There are several bits I plan to write about but today I’m focusing on his idea of a “Twitter Save Button”.
So much of the time, Twitter moves too fast. If we follow a couple hundred active accounts or more, the Tweets often come in faster than we can read them. As a result, we feel pressured to keep refreshing rather than dive in meaningfully and take our time to explore the stuff that interests us. At the same time, really intriguing Tweets and links go by and we don’t have a way to save them for later. Poof, they’re gone.
And, later:
Imagine if every single thing we saw on Twitter could be saved/stored indefinitely. Not just every article or link like with Pocket, but every Tweet, every photo, every video. We could keep every product we saw mentioned, every book that looked interesting, every destination we wanted to visit someday, every concert we wanted to go see, and every ad that piqued our curiosity. All of this could be saved to a Vault within Twitter with just one button in line with the RT and Fav buttons in each Tweet.
This sort of describes a feature we built into Unmark. Like Pocket we store the link from any favorited tweet — however, Unmark goes a bit beyond that. It looks at the URL and tries to determine what you want to do with that link (read, buy, watch, listen, etc.) and labels it appropriately. You can also choose your own label if you’d like. Unmark also “pulls in” the data around the link so that you can act on it right within Unmark. The easiest example would be a video… rather than going off to YouTube to watch it, you can watch the video right within Unmark. Or a Soundcloud link can be listened to or an Instagram photo viewed, etc. Then you can mark it as “done” whenever you want. We do this for recipes, products on Amazon, etc. etc. and we plan on extending it further and further to get very, very smart.
I use this feature profusely. Like, on average, 18 times a day since Unmark was released. The best part about it? It records the tweet from whence it came so that I can remember both the Twitter account that referred me to it and also the context from which it was linked. Like; my friend Yaron linked to this and he didn’t like it — is a lot different than if Yaron liked it.
What Sacca describes above is much more than what Unmark currently does but just this single feature of Unmark could fill in this gap for some. Gosh I love Unmark.