Earthling

A Favorites application of our own has been on EarthLink's 2006 Roadmap for a while, as a key utility to bring to our portal and sister applications. As you can tell by our approach, we're not trying to beat del.icio.us or simpy or myweb. It's not about blowing away the competition with innovation; it's about developing a tool that's easy to learn and that integrates smartly and simply with our current and future toolset.

One of the tougher parts of getting it out to market quickly is all of the additional thinking that has to go into it to integrate with our existing systems and make sure we can support the kinds of numbers we get on the myEarthlink portal. Unlike a start-up, we come to the table with a sizable user base and a pre-existing suite of applications. myFavorites and Reader are pieces of a larger initiative and need some other moving parts in order to have all of the features we'd like them to have.

We've been testing a prototype of a social bookmarking application internally for months now, and I've been double-tagging some stuff to both del.icio.us and it. It was neat to watch the thing grow up before my eyes, and I'd like to extend my and EarthLink's thanks to everyone who contributed and the work that continues on myFavorites, including Product and Project Management, Engineering, Design, and Development, and Systems Administration and Operations.

We're taking an iterative approach to the application's development, where our engineers make changes, test them, and release them on an ongoing basis instead of big "1.0," "2.0"-style releases. We're keeping things moving. Because it lives in the myEarthLink world, we'll continue to add levels of integration and refinement that make it talk nicely to current and new parts of your portal services.

Here are a few of the current features. You can:

• Save and share URLs and add tags and notes to help organize them for later.
  
• View the most recent and most popular URL's across all users.
  
• Import your data from del.icio.us (or export it), with the tags preserved.
  
• View video clips from myEarthLink's video news inline, right on your myFavorites page.
  
• Save favorites directly from Reader into myFavorites.
  
• Use a browser button or "bookmarklet" - This is a button you can place in your browser's toolbar so that any time you come across a URL you'd like to save, you can grab it and save it without leaving the page.
  

There's lots more to come in the upcoming weeks and months. In addition to incremental interface and usability tweaks which you can keep up with on the myFavorites blog, we're also working on deepening your ability to share and view the bookmarks of others, bring in more information from your myEarthLink start page, and communicate your favorites in different ways. One of the specific enhancements we're working on is JavaScript and RSS portability, to allow you to take all or part of your favorites or the "most popular" and "most recent" with you wherever you want them, with code snippets. You'll be able to display your latest finds on your blog, start page, or anywhere else that accepts JavaScript and/or RSS.

Another thing we need to do is help teach those who don't know about it what it's all about. Like I said above, once you start using it, it's a really indispensable tool. But it's still a fairly new part of the toolbox for many of our users, and part of our challenge is showing that a "favorite" is not really the same thing as a "bookmark" so much. We've come to think of a bookmark as a static link to an entire web site, like your bank or your favorite online store. Favorites are there to catch all of the one-off things you want to keep track of that aren't the same old site you visit every day. In the past I've called it your accordion file or "overflowing costanza wallet" of URLs. I need this, and most people I know could use this even if they don't know it exists yet.