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ke_ga | 2 years ago
Today, important units of productivity and organisation are: - Urls - Screenshots (and images) - & notes
Our goal is to create a simple purpose built tool to assist people stay organised with respect to all 3 of the above. Hence us considering Zlinky a productivity tool. We feel we have made a good start, but we still have a long way to go along our planned roadmap. Perhaps it is premature and presumptuous to call Zlinky a productivity tool at this stage, but that is the ultimate goal.
As for how is Zlinky different from those tools that you tried that didn't "stick": I can't speak for the other tools, but we have focussed on optimising for mobile "native share" into folders, as well as overall simplicity.
We see Zlinky more as Url management than bookmarking web links per se. Eg, TikTok videos and Instagram posts don't index particularly well in Google. When I watch a TikTok video by a marketing genius that I want to hang on to, with Zlinky it is a quick "share into" Zlinky and I am done. Without Zlinky, perhaps I can copy the Url into Google Keep? Or a paste into a Google Doc? What about when I want to review these links - they probably won't have previews in Google Docs, furthermore the unstructured nature of these general note taking / documents introduces organisation friction and overhead. Importantly if I want to find that TikTok video again, it would be difficult via Google, possible via TikTok search, but I would have to remember that it was TikTok I saw the video on, and not YouTube, Insta etc.
People also generally try to save interesting/useful Instagram posts, YouTube vids, TikTok videos etc, but then often give up, as they can't remember where they saved what - a lost opportunity to build out a collection of resources in one place as you consume content.
Interesting point re bypassing the organised hierarchy. We will also be implementing a search feature. In Zlinky's case, the goal of the folder structure plus preview images, is to allow for easy "scannability" of the saved url/screenshot/image and attached note.
Screenshots: As noted above we consider screenshots an important unit of productivity. Hence us providing capability to save and organize screenshots. In particular, we feel that people have an intuitive sense of when a screenshot is important, vs a general screenshot unlikely to be needed again. For example over Christmas I had a few overseas friends send me their address via Whatsapp as requested so I could send them Christmas gifts. I screenshotted the address and added it to a Zlinky folder. Super easy when I was at the post office to find these addresses. I also screenshot Instagram stories when I want to save the content into Zlinky, as the Instagram stories generally disappear.
Perhaps the target market is someone like me, someone that consumes content and resources intensely and from a wide range of platforms? And has multiple mini projects on the go, and has bits and pieces to reference regularly or semi regularly.
It is still early days, but the Zlinky use cases we are seeing are very eclectic and diverse, which is encouraging. This could be an indicator that my hunch could be correct, that many people could do with a set of simple tools to help get organised to help them achieve tasks.
Furthermore, we hope to continue to make the product more useful, eg we want to provide the ability for people to follow a specific folder of a user (friend/colleague). For example a business owner could create a folder called "Customer Service", allow team members to follow this folder, and populate the folder with YouTube videos, Instagram Posts, articles, screenshots etc. The business owner could add and prune as necessary. Sure you could do this in Google Drive, but Google Drive is really not purpose built for this.
I hope you will try the product and send me further questions and feedback.
Thanks again. Kevin
rantallion|2 years ago
According to whom? I can see the value in storing and organising notes, but screenshots and bookmarks managed outside of notes just end up being a list that's forgotten about - after all, there's no context, so you don't remember what was special about what you bookmarked or why you did it.
ke_ga|2 years ago