Even though we have many apps like Evernote, Pocket, Diigo & Xmarks however it is a hassle to find the one that suits your style & satisfies your needs. I have been a loyal user of Diigo to bookmark, annotate, share & collaborate. However I always yearned for a tool that allows me to share my bookmarks with others & see what others have been learning.
I recently stumbled upon a service called Kifi which has so far managed to figure out the right recipe for bookmarking and collective learning.
Table of Contents
Bookmarking
We have been bookmarking webpages with the click on a star button & saving webpage links in our browsers to later revisit when we need them.
With Kifi’s chrome extension, I now bookmark effectively because of its new seamless options to keep, share, annotate & collaborate in libraries.
You can ‘keep’ (bookmark) this article by clicking the heart that says ‘Keep it’. You can also send this to a friend via email or share this with a connection on Kifi. While ‘keeping’ articles, you can add notes for your reference as well as add tags to later find out this particular piece.
Collaboration
What’s missing from Pocket is the ability to learn from what others have bookmarked or share your bookmarks so that other can benefit from them.
With Kifi, you can share your favourite articles in a library with public so that anyone can see what amazing material you have been reading on that particular topic.
You may also invite a collaborator. Be it your friend, coworker or a pen pal who shares similar interests; together you can keep valuable finds in one place.
Collective Learning
Collaboration and learning from resources shared by others gave a new way of bookmarking web pages for information relevant to a group of people.
Kifi has a beautiful user interface, the ability to share bookmarks in respective libraries & see what others have bookmarked on different topics. It also enables a user to find a ‘keep’ in his own library as well as relevant keeps in others public libraries.
By typing “writing” I was able to see matching ‘keeps’ as well as relevant public libraries of other users.
Private Libraries
Kifi’s most beloved feature is the ability to have libraries private to yourself. You are working on a project and during research and you find valuable material but it is not something you want to share with public. You can simply create a private library & keep your project bookmarks in it, for your eyes only.
Interests & Recommendations
When you join Kifi, you are asked to specify your interests. You get to choose from a range of interests so that relevant articles are recommended on your feed or timeline.
When you open up your Kifi. You are welcomed by a feed of recommendations based on your keeps and searches. This feed may also contain items made by Kifi curators which you can choose to continue seeing or block.
Although Kifi has a lot to improve on its recommendation algorithm but this bookmarking powered collective knowledge base is helping me learn new things everyday. Kifi will reshape the way you bookmark and it will add more value to the whole process by allowing each other to share the amazing keeps.