Jon Aquino's Mental Garden

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Friday, April 22, 2005

Gmail as your private del.icio.us (and alternative to Furl)

Suppose there's a webpage that you want to save, but it's a private matter (e.g. medical) and you don't want to put it on del.icio.us. It turns out that you can simply select everything on the page and paste it directly into Gmail, all without leaving your browser. Gmail has rich text editing, so all the colours, fonts and images are preserved! No need to break out Microsoft Word -- this shows that we are moving closer to a bona fide Web OS.

(You don't have to enter an email address -- just hit Save Draft.)

If you want a Gmail invite, let me know.

7 Comments:

  • Wow. I've been using Gmail as my notepad ever since you mentioned it here. Now I'll be using it to save pages, too!

    By Blogger Darius Kazemi, at 4/24/2005 7:28 a.m.  

  • Yeah, Gmail is a great Notepad replacement! It does have some problems (e.g. can't search a note) -- wish the Firefox and Google folks would collaborate to solve glitches like that. But Google has hired a couple of Firefox programmers, so ya never know!

    By Blogger Jonathan, at 4/24/2005 9:16 a.m.  

  • Another advantage of Gmail over Furl is that you can freely annotate the text.

    By Blogger Jonathan, at 4/26/2005 8:57 p.m.  

  • While your gmail idea is a nifty hack, I'm rather partial to spurl.net (a service similiar to - but imho better than - furl).

    With spurl, you can mark anything as private (viewable only by you, logged in), but you can still easily access it via spurl or via many available firefox tricks (e.g., sp [keyword]).

    By Blogger AdamTest, at 7/07/2005 1:43 a.m.  

  • Hi Adam - I'll chek out spurl/furl sometime. I've been hearing good things about them.

    By Blogger Jonathan, at 7/07/2005 11:38 p.m.  

  • I now send copies of my blog posts to my e-mail newsletter. I spoon feed these readers.

    Thanks for the tip.

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 7/08/2005 8:55 p.m.  

  • Hi Russell - I'm delighted that you find it useful. Also I like the humorous posts on your blog.

    By Blogger Jonathan, at 7/09/2005 10:33 a.m.  

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