Personally Deliver Recommended Links to Your Friends with Handpick

Handpick is a simple tool with a huge benefit: it lets you personally handpick links from the Web and deliver them to your friends via a daily digest. If you’re someone who is often sharing links with specific friends individually, you’ll love the convenience of using Handpick. It stops you from bombarding your friends with numerous emails of recommended links service, plus it lets you email all of your friends at once.

Let’s see just how Handpick works.

Of course you’ll need a way to actually “handpick” links on the Web, so you’ll need to install the bookmarklet or Chrome extension.

You can also add a Handpick bookmark to your iPhone or iPad. Just visit this page on your device and follow the directions so that you can “handpick” links on your mobile device.

The second step is to create a group of people to “handpick” for. These should be all people that will like the types of links you’ll be sharing; therefore they should have a common interest. You’ll be able to create as many groups as you want. Each group will show up as a check-box when sharing and you’ll be able to choose which groups you want to share to.

All that is needed to create a group is a name and time that you want the group members to receive their daily email digest.

Next you’ll need to add members to your group. As mentioned above, those members will receive a daily email digest of all of the links that you handpick for the day. Members are added by manually entering their name and email one-by-one. Just keep adding members until you’ve got everyone that you want to share with in that specific group. Since Handpick is in early beta, I’m sure that this method of adding members will change since it would surely be so much easier to import your email contacts or choose friends from Facebook or Twitter.

You can also manage your group and change the name, delivery time, and email subject for the daily digest. Additionally, you can choose to turn on/off delivery via BCC. If you turn it on, all members of the group will be able to see the email address of each group member. This is a very bad idea if the members do not know each other. However, if you’re all friends then this shouldn’t be an issue since you’ll more than likely have each others email addresses and probably correspond with each other frequently.

There is also a feature called “Contributable” which you can also turn on/off. With this on, you will allow all members in the group to handpick content for that specific group. So if they have a Handpick account, your group will show up in their accounts as well so that they can also send links to it.

All that’s left is to browse the Web and “handpick” links. When you find something you want to share, click the bookmarklet or browser icon in Chrome and you’ll get a small window with sharing options.

You can change the title and enter a description. Don’t forget to choose the group that you want to share to! Finally click on “share” and you’re all done.

As you can see, it has never bee easier to share links with specific friends. I not only love the concept of Handpick, but I love how easy it is to set up and share to people that I usually have to email individually. I do, however, hope to see an improvement in the design of the site and also in the way that you add members to the group.

Handpick is currently in private beta, so you will need an invite to try it out.

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Keep with your closest friends who uses the social dashboard Geeje

If you're like me, there may be a small group of online friends who you can connect with each social network and you have you become a little like an online family. If Yes, that applies to you, then the Geeje is the ideal tool to help you keep up with the closest online friends.

The concept is quite simple. First, you can create a profile of your friend and then add feeds that apply to them. Do not think that the word "Feeds" like blog feeds if, also applies to social networking profiles. Best of all, you don't need an actual RSS feed to follow. You can simply enter the URL of your blog or social network profile that you want to keep up with and Geeje will do the rest.

Geeje keeps you know, is a noticeboard for close friends and people you follow is to stay connected with people that interest you.

The first is to create a profile for each one of your friends. This is done, I guess, by clicking "add to profile" from the top of your dashboard. You must enter here is a name (real name or nickname will do).

Then, you will need to add URLs to your friends ' profiles by clicking the "Add feed" at the top of the dashboard. As mentioned above, here is the URL of your blog or your friend's profiles (although an RSS feed will work too). You will have to add each one separately, so depending on how many URLs you have for each friend that could take awhile.

The last step is to add to your profile dashboard (where you can keep all your friends at once). This is done by clicking on the "D" which will appear on the right of the names of your friends when you scroll up in the sidebar of the Tableau.

Once you add all the desired profile to your dashboard, you will see that each friend will have their own widgets and widget displays all your feeds together (instead of separately, as in the profile).

This step should be for interaction, but this is not possible within Geeje (not yet anyway). You cannot make any interaction, but you can click on links or icons to go to the original source and interacting there.

Another way to set up your dashboard may be to create a profile on a social network that you want to keep up with, rather than for individual friends.

For example, you could have one profile named Twitter, another called Facebook and another called Google. Then in Twitter could add any URL to your friends so that all Twitter updates will appear within the same widget on your dashboard.

This method allows you to see all the updates from a single source with its own widget, rather than the gross of all.

Finally, let's not forget about the search feature. At the moment seems to allow you to search for profiles or services that you might have added. It would be nice if you could actually search for keywords within your friends updates, but perhaps that is coming soon ….

Personally, I like Geeje because it makes it really easy for me to my circle of friends with thick online. I wish there were slightly more features – primarily a way to interact without leaving the site. However, it is now functional enough to do the work that needs to be done.

What are your thoughts?

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