Like most people these days, I browse the web constantly and end up with too many tabs. We all know this problem. These tabs are important enough that I don’t want to close and forget about them, but they’re not important enough that I’m actually going to create bookmarks for them in my browser. These tabs slow down my computer and, what’s more, after I finally close them, I often want to find them again when I remember, weeks later, that I need some important information from one of those long abandoned tabs.

The point of Linksort is to solve these problems and others. It aims to make it easy–even effortless–for you to save your links, organize them, search them, and share them with friends. Moreover, it aims to achieve these goals while being simple to use and beautiful to look at.

Prior art & pain points

I’ve tried to solve such problems for myself in a few different ways over the years. I’ve tried using Pocket, Instapaper, Raindrop, Journal, and more. I even wrote my own browser extension to try and solve the problem, but nothing has worked. All of these solutions have fallen short in one way or another. Here are a few reasons why.

• Ask too much. Some existing solutions require me to manually organize my links. In most cases, however, I want my link-saving service to do this for me, to provide some kind of default organization that is effective when I need it, out-of-the-way when I don’t, and which doesn’t require any mental energy on my part.
• Don’t support modern browsing. Other existing apps such as Instapaper and Pocket were designed to save text-based articles and they still do this well. The problem is that the internet has changed since these apps debuted and now I–and I suspect others–want to save links to Google Docs, Figma files, YouTube videos, and other kinds of dynamic content.
• Not cloud based. The problem with my own browser extension and similar solutions is that if I save a link on one computer, I can’t get to it from another. I want to be able to access my links from any of my computers or my phone.
• Not social. While some links I want to save are relevant to me, others are of interest to my friends and family and I’d like to be able to share them easily.

Plan

The plan is that, over the next several months, I and a few friends are going to build and release Linksort’s MVP. Given the nature of software development, our first release likely won’t include all of the bells and whistles we want, but soon enough we’ll add features that address every one of the pain points I enumerated above–and more.

We’re going to keep a blog about the experience of building this app and talk about branding, research, and technical challenges the team faces and the solutions we develop. My hope is that this will help to attract a following, engage potential customers, and be genuinely useful for others who face similar problems.

There’s a lot of work to do before we get to release and I’m excited about sharing the process here. I can’t wait to show you what Linksort can do.

Thanks to Catherine Vidos for comments on an earlier draft.