I was just reading an article from Louis Gray about how to use the very cool and capable FriendFeed bookmarklet.

That got me thinking about just how many bookmarklets I have gathered in the past couple of months, and what they all do. You can see them in the screenshot over there.

Social Media Bookmarklets

Ok, be careful clicking on these.. the bold text (in most cases) is the actual bookmarklet. Just drag them into your bookmark toolbar or a folder to use them:

• Add to Mixx
• Share on Tumblr: A custom bookmarklet to clip pictures and quotes to a Tumblr tumblelog.
• gReader Comments: A fantastic bookmarklet from Paul Arterburn that lets you create/participate in a Disqus discussion on any web URL.
• Share on Facebook
• Share on FriendFeed
• Subscribe in Google Reader via Toluu: Use this bookmarklet instead of adding feeds manually to GR and you will also get them in Toluu, which will alert your friends on the service.
• Add to S|B: This is a bookmarklet for the lifestreaming app Second Brain
• Diigolet: Brings up a cool javascript Diigo bar, handy if you are using a browser that does not have support for the Diigo addon yet, like Safari.
• Twurl this!: Drop a link into Twurl.
• Note in Reader: The latest bookmarklet for Google Reader, highlight a section of an article and then click on this. Also allows you to add a personal note.
• Clip to Evernote: Handy way to save parts of the web to Evernote, a web-based image and html storage and search utility.
• Tweetshot: A special utility for making a consistently-perfect screenshot of a Twitter tweet.
• View in Google Earth: Highlight an address or some co-ordinates and use this to bring up the location in Google Earth.
• Clip it! on s|m: A Social|Median bookmarklet, used the same way as the Mixx one.

.. and that’s just my set of social media bookmarklets. The reason I don’t have bookmarklets for certain things (like del.icio.us, Iterasi, StumbleUpon etc.) is because they primarily use browser addons. However, especially in the case of Iterasi, I would love to see a bookmarklet version.

Web Development Bookmarklets

If you are using FireFox (or, to a lesser extent Opera or IE), there is another group of bookmarklets that are really handy that you must check out. They are called web development bookmarklets and they can do magic with CSS.

I would call these essential if you do any sort of web development or are interested in CSS at all.

If you have any bookmarklets you find essential or really useful, please link them up in the comments! Especially a good Digg bookmarklet, for some reason it doesn’t seem to exist.

  Image by Tom Raftery via Flickr

Today I noticed an interesting new multi-browser plugin called Zemanta. Having both Firefox installed and a WordPress blog, I decided I would give it a spin and see what it could dig up for me with itself as the topic. So far, it found a nice screenshot and a few good related articles.

Plus, it scans the articles for words it can make link-able with anchor tags, which saves time.  And it suggests tags too. Ok, that’s pretty cool.

It looks promising.

For me personally though, I use Windows Live Writer almost exclusively when creating content for my blog. Zemanta works through the browser and only activates when it notices you are on a write post page for WordPress, Blogger, etc. So, I don’t know how much I will use it. We’ll see.

In the course of reviewing different Twitter add-ons to Firefox yesterday, I noticed there was an entire page of betas that required a login to install. One of the betas that I noticed was called TwitKit. Apparently, I’m too lazy to create a login, but I did find the link to the developer site in the details.

I couldn’t find any screenshots of the app anywhere. But I shrugged and went ahead and installed it. You can see a thumbnail of what it looks like over there. I have to say, I’m impressed, even with this beta.

First, it has a nice, clean interface reminiscent of TweetBar (which I reviewed here), in a pleasant brown color (or is that colour) scheme. There are 6 tabs, and it defaults to the 2nd, user.

Public shows you everyone’s tweets. User shows you the latest tweets from your friends. Friends gives you a list of the people are you following. Followers shows you who is following you. @s are messages directed toward you and me gives you a handy stat page similar to the “about” page on Twitter.

Also on the interface page, you have self-explanatory refresh and clear buttons. Below that is your list of tweets. Now this is what gets my excited — as opposed to TweetBar, TwitKit has a tiny reply and favorite icon below each user picture. Perfect! Also, not shown, there is a red dot on the right side of your own tweets, which can be used to ‘hide’ an update. This feature doesn’t seem to work consistently, or well. But this is a beta so I am not too worried.

Aside from the main interface, there is also an options page that allows you to add the from application to each tweet, a refresh timer setting, the ability to change how names are shown, and a pull-down selection of 4 different color themes.

After using this add-on for a couple of days, I have to say that I find it fully as enjoyable to use as TwitterFox, but in a full sidebar form factor. It is stable and responsive. There are a couple of drawbacks, but they aren’t major: First, you cannot install TwitKit on Firefox Beta 3, it only works with FF2. Also, TwitterFox supports multiple Twitter logins in the interface, and with TwitKit you would need to sign out, and then sign back in to a different log in, which would be a pain.

Otherwise, it is stable and easy to use. I can definitely recommend this product!

Update: If you already have Tweetbar installed and active, disable or uninstall it before installing TwitKit.  Apparently the two plugins don’t like each other much.  Thanks tw3nty3ight for the heads-up!