I posted about LinkNotify when it was first launched, earlier this year. Now, the iPhone app has launched (available in the App Store), making the experience even better for mobile consumption.
LinkNotify is basically a content consumption/discovery tool that gives you better access to the content your real friends (and publications you personally like) think you should see. It does this by utilizing your Facebook social graph, and showing you the links your friends and Pages you “like” are sharing in a convenient, sortable way, and letting you control how it’s filtered (or not filtered).
It’s about the links to real content. It doesn’t include all of the mundane status updates. You can still use Facebook for those. Perhaps, more importantly, it keeps you from missing stuff. For example, on LinkNotify, I just saw a link for an interesting trailer for a Korean movie called “Quick” that my friend Todd shared on Facebook. Looking at my news feed (even when sorted by most recent – he only shared it a few minutes ago), Facebook is giving me no indication that he did so. I would have to go to his Wall out of the blue to see that he posted it. LinkNotify simply see when your friends post links, and it goes into the main feed. Again, just content. Not status updates or annoying game stuff.
We recently wrote about the “Filter Bubble” – where the content we consume is becoming more filtered by the search engines and social networks we use. Google and Facebook, for example, tailor the search results and news feed content they show us based on what they think we want to see, but they are choosing it for us.
LinkNotify, actually lets you filter the content your friends are sharing yourself, in the way you want to filter it, basically giving you more control.
- You can view all of the links shared by all of your Facebook friends and all of the Pages you “like” all in one feed that is updated in realtime.
- If you like, you can view only the links shared by your actual friends, so the people you’re friends with are the curators of the content you’re looking at, as opposed to the news publications or brands you follow.
- Still, you follow these publications and brands for a reason, and you can also sort your list to view only the links shared by these.
- You can also create custom friend lists on Facebook, and then view links shared specifically by people within these lists.
With the iPhone app, you can set whichever linkset you want as the one it defaults to when you open it. If, for example, you want to see the links from your family first and foremost, you can create a family list on Facebook (if you haven’t already done so), and see just the links they’re sharing.
If there are people you are friends with or Pages you “like” on Facebook, but don’t necessarily care about the content they’re sharing, you can remove them from your lists, without removing them on Facebook itself. This means you can create as enjoyable an experience as you want, without having to sacrifice friends or deals.
With the iPhone app, you can search through your links as well.
“With 695,000 status updates, 79,364 wall posts, and 510,040 comments going up every 60 seconds people need a way to quickly and easily keep up with the latest in their Facebook community in an organized way–LinkNotify is the app that does just that,” says Joe Purcell, lead developer on the app.
The iPhone app is the only mobile app for LinkNotify that’s currently available, but the mobile website at m.linknotify.com has a very usable interface as well, so if you use Android, BlackBerry, Windows Phone, or something else, you can still enjoy the LinkNotify experience on mobile. On my Android device I simply have a bookmark saved to my home screen, and it works just fine.
Don’t forget, you can go to LinkNotify.com anytime from the desktop and use the service.
Full Disclosure: LinkNotify was developed by iEntry, the parent company of WebProNews. It joins Twellow and Social Ditto in our family of social media-related services.