Home ClikBall: A Slick New Way to Share Links, From the Creator of Userscripts.org

ClikBall: A Slick New Way to Share Links, From the Creator of Userscripts.org

ClikBall is a handsome looking new application built in part by Jesse Andrews, the man responsible for Greasemonkey script repository Userscripts.org. Described literally, ClikBall is a browser plug-in that allows you to share links and messages with friends, groups, privately, on Twitter and on FriendFeed. The service is in Private Beta, but Userscripts visitors were just welcomed in and the Andrews says ReadWriteWeb readers can join (and follow me) via this link.

That description above doesn’t really do the service justice – it’s the user experience that makes ClikBall stand out. There’s something magical about the grace of the app, and there’s clearly a premium put on sharing links that lots of other people will want to click on and share.

All your friends’ shared links, comments and your own searchable archive hide down in your browser’s status bar. Unless you change the app’s settings, new links shared by your friends appear along with their user icon down in the same space. With a click you can expand the thread of shared items, as well.

There’s lots of nice little touches here – like the most popular items among your circle of friends, apart from the most universally popular links. The application also installs a custom search engine into your browser, which augments the regular google results with items that you’ve shared on Clikball.

I’m going to try using this to share my links on Twitter for a little while, instead of doing it through Tweetdeck. There are a few things I’d like to see changed, of course. I’d like to be able to set sharing to Twitter as automatic and I’d like to have a choice in URL shorteners used, at least when posting to Twitter, as I have a strong preference for using the semantic and API friendly Bit.ly. I’d also really like some data export options and there doesn’t appear to be any right now. This app could use some more visual elements to it, too. Enjoysthin.gs (our review) could be a good inspiration, and ClikBall for it, too.

One might ask, what’s the difference between this and Pierre Omidyar’s Ginx, which I gave a scathing review last week. I think there’s something about the way that ClikBall seems to integrate with my existing workflow, and uses AJAX in some nice ways, that makes it much more pleasing to use. And, to be frank, ClikBall was built by the guy who made Userscripts.org – one of the best sites on the internet. That’s exciting. Credit is also due to Anthony Young, the co-founder of Flock and Ex-flock crew Geoffrey Arone & Raj Paul.

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