Links are Broken
(Pun Intended),
and how you
can fix them
Links are the backbone of the internet. No question about it. But what happens when the backbone starts crumbling?
Links are ugly. There, I said it. Something that everyone probably knew, but was too afraid to admit. Links put readers in a dilemma they don’t want to be in and force them to make a choice they don’t want to make: to click or not to click. Clicking might take me to an alien land (with its inhabitants speaking a language I do not speak). Not clicking might deprive me of an opportunity to take a sip from an enormous fountain of knowledge. Either way, there is no chance of making an informed decision. “Arrggh, Random Faceless Link. Why do you have to put me in such a hopeless position?”
Sebastien Kersten offers some great alternatives to links as an ‘information gateway’ in this link (See what I did there).
Here, I am going to focus on 3 very specific problems with links and then take a shot at explaining how Cubeit can ‘fix your broken links’
#1 Biting more links than you can chew
We are all guilty of saving more links for offline reading than we can handle. Broadly, we do this for two reasons:
- We have read the link and figure it might come in handy in the future
- We haven’t read the link, but assume that it will be useful from the title/preview (Read-It-Later)
Furthermore, the more the number of links saved, the more is the organizational burden. Read-it-later apps like Pocket try to bring some order to the chaos by giving the option of manually categorizing articles based on tags. Tags are a way of clustering similar articles (similar can mean coming from the same source/ related to the same topic). But what if the tags themselves get overcrowded? Which brings us to the next problem.
#2 Finding an Article from a Tagstack
Say, you’ve added a 100 links to Pocket, all related to Online Marketing. You think there is scope for further classification and create 3 tags : SEO, Content Marketing and Email Marketing. You sit back, admiring a job well done? Well, should you?
For all the breakthroughs Pocket has achieved with regards to the way we consume content on the Internet, it still has some fundamental limitations. What if there were 40 links in your SEO tag and you wished to retrieve one particular article on Growth Hacks for Startups. The keywords you are most likely to input are ‘Growth’ (28 hits), ‘Hacks’ (16 hits) and ‘Startups’. You start typing in the keywords and press Enter.
Expectation: 5 hits (from which you can zero in on the required article)
Reality: 0 hits (Wait, WHAT?!)
This is because the free version of Pocket only allows for sequential searching i.e if the sequence in which you remember keywords doesn’t match the string sequence in the title, the screen displays a message no searcher ever wants to see — “No Results Found” *Facepalm*
Another problem is that Pocket only allows keyword search from the title. What if I only remember the fact that Sean Ellis had been quoted in the article I want to retrieve? Again, good luck scrolling through all 40 links and trying to rack your brain, hoping your memory bails you out. Except, it never does, does it?
I’m not even finished yet. Let’s move on to the next problem
#3 Sharing Reading Lists with Friends
Just a couple of days back, 3 of my friends, working at their respective startups asked me if I could send some links on Pre-Launch Traffic Strategies or Digital Media Marketing in general, their way. As it turned out, I had the perfect resources safely stowed away in my Pocket. I had been diligently collecting interesting articles on “Growth Hacking” and thought that my friends would benefit immensely from this. I started looking for the telltale Share button.
Imagine my horror when I realized that the free version of Pocket doesn’t support even this i.e one cannot share a tag (a set of links related to a particular topic) with a friend. Such a fundamental action, this. Sharing your knowledge or expertise on something or even better, receiving said knowledge with two taps.
Time to look for alternatives?
Did someone say Evernote? I’m not kidding, I did hear ya. Well, here’s the problem. Evernote is a smashing app, wonderful as a workspace to get things done. But, many users have complained that it is too complex and clunky. This Quora answer so beautifully captures the problem that I’d like to quote it here.
“ I end up with a huge repository of notes and notebooks which are not very usable and that reduces my desire to go back and re-read them.
My main aim is to collect just useful pieces of information in a clear and readable format that i can review later and repeat until i have learnt it. I want simple summaries that are topic-based and are clear, readable, and just what i find important. Evernote has all of this functionality, but is too complex for this task so i keep ending up with huge, ugly, over-filled notebooks and notes.”
Plus, it also suffers from Problem #3 (which is, in my mind, The Holy Grail of problems associated with link-storing). You CAN tag similar links (which are then saved as notes) but can’t SHARE a tag with friends. (*starts pulling hair out*)
What we need is an elegant solution to ALL the above problems
*drumroll* Enter Cubeit. Enough mucking around. Let’s get straight to the point. With Cubeit, you can:
- Collect as many links as possible from anywhere (Browser, Feedly, Flipboard, Quora, TechCrunch), without worrying about them getting lost. This is because you can create nifty, little “cubes” to hold all your content related to a particular topic. Links are transformed to smart, actionable info cards
2. Easily find content you are looking for. This is made possible by Cubeit’s guided search feature, which enables you to keep on entering keywords till you find the content you are looking for (Psst, did we mention that search keywords can be from the article too?)
3. Share your knowhow by sharing a cube with a single right swipe or invite collaboration on a shared cube so that you get to learn together.
So here’s how I finally managed to share my multi-sourced “Growth Hacking Cube” and won the eternal love and respect of my entrepreneur friends (or so I like to think.)
We are in closed beta and have only 20 invites to give away. Get Cubeit here and share your knowledge with friends and family !
Tweet to me at @VinitJoshi8 with your comments and let’s have a meaningful discussion over this
