The social Web is noisy. Each individual social network is noisy enough, but there’s a second layer of noise – notifications – in which all the social apps compete with each other just to draw the user in. The creator of Handpick sent me along his solution today, and I love where it’s going.
Handpick is a social Web app that doesn’t interfere with the Web itself. It lives in your bookmarks bar or Chrome extensions. When you find a link you want to share, you click it, and it pops up a simple form for a title, link, description and a checklist of recipient groups you’ve created. When you click ‘share,’ it doesn’t buzz all your friends’ phones right away. It collects links for you all day and sends an email digest to each group in the evening.
Good old email. It’s a perfectly good place to receive and discuss links, as it has always been, but the social network streams have become the de facto places for that in the Web 2.0 era. That’s why they’re so noisy. Every time someone posts a link, our feeds get bumped again. Every time someone likes, comments, ?s, ?s or +1s, it instantly generates a notification.
Now, that’s still better than an inbox full of email, but that’s not Handpick‘s solution. Recipients of your Handpick links only get one message, and it arrives late in the day, when there’s more time for thinking. You create groups of contacts using whatever criteria you choose, and each group gets one message around 5 p.m. Pacific Time.
It has support for desktop and iPhone browser bookmarklets, a Chrome extension, and it can link with Instapaper. It’s a great way to share selectively with minimal interruption, reaching your contacts in a place they’d check anyway. Want to try it out? Here’s an invite link. Room is limited. First come, first served.
