Daniel GolantPractical Developers,
I write to you in an hour of great need. I have, in the parlance of today's internet, done a thing, and might for the very first time in my life "ship" said thing. Unfortunately I have a problem I cannot tackle on my own. I need testers.
In order to give background, I have to confess something: I am a tab hoarder. Or at least I was, until I built LinkMeLater. A few months ago, my friend Jared brought up a weird idiosyncratic behavior he noticed a few people exhibiting: emailing links to themselves for later consumption. I mentioned that I actually did that too, and that I would often go through my 40+ open tabs in a window, close the tabs I didn't need anymore, and email myself the articles or videos I wanted to get back to at a later date. He argued that that whole process really shouldn't exist, given that there are both plenty of tools for reading-list management, tab management, and link sharing.
Over the course of the conversation I noticed that the key similarity between all these services was that they expected you to adopt new, sometimes unfamiliar behavior, for a marginal payoff at best. It's much harder to remember to hit the Pocket button and then remember to read your Pocket collection (even if they remind you), than it is to just email it to yourself and only zero out your inbox once you have time to check out whatever you were looking at.
With that in mind, I built LinkMeLater. The LinkMeLater Chrome Extension does something really simple: it saves the tab you're currently looking at, and closes it (if you configure it to in its settings).
The LinkMeLater service then picks up any link saved more than 1 day ago, and randomly decides whether to send it to you. These semi-daily emails come either in the form of a series of individual emails for the day, or a single digest email that contains all of them.
You can also see all the links you've saved by navigating to your dashboard, in case you realize you want to share a link before it comes to your inbox.
Here's my problem though: I would love to launch this to a larger audience, but I have only managed to get 3 friends to test this. I'm not sure what I should add to it next, or where improvements need to be made. The tool fits my needs, but I would love to keep working on it. My current roadmap includes weekly/monthly/user-scheduled emails (as opposed to semi-daily), user-controlled link selection probability, and additional delivery media, such as SMS, but prioritizing those things means figuring out what a potential user wants most.
If LinkMeLater sounds useful to you, I'd love it if members of this great community checked it out and gave me feedback. To set it up, simply sign up on the site, and download the chrome extension that's linked on the homepage. Thanks for reading, I hope to hear from some of y'all 😃.
Edit: Thanks to some comments from readers, I gave porting LML to Firefox a shot, and it's now available at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/linkmelater/ 😃.
