Home ANTHILL TV Trunk.ly’s new look to link your online life (and links)

Trunk.ly’s new look to link your online life (and links)

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Could Australian start-up Trunk.ly be the missing link in your online life?

According to co-founders Tim Bull and Alex Dong, they’re offering no less than the “easiest way to save and organise links.”

“We’ve both been really passionate about how to help users discover information from what they do online – it’s been a common thread through the various ideas we’ve worked on, but Trunk.ly is definitely ‘it’,” Bull says.

“I think traditionally people who bookmark a lot have tended to be very deeply interested in a content area. They bookmark to organise and recall interesting things, but they were also bookmarking to act as a resource for others, perhaps demonstrate some social proof or just to network and discover other like minded people.”

“‘Expert’ bookmarkers and more casual users can benefit from Trunk.ly. The same benefits apply, but our automation and search means that you don’t have to actively try and ‘organise the internet’ – you just do what you do on Twitter, Facebook and others and we collect it for you.”

Trunk.ly gaining ground as Delicious continues to struggle

With Delicious – the Grand Poobah of online bookmarking pre-Yahoo! acquisition — struggling to recapture that loving feeling post-relaunch, Trunk.ly has the golden, bejewelled crown firmly in its sights.

Speaking of Delicious, what does Trunk.ly think of said relaunch?

“There’s no doubt that Delicious as it was just wasn’t sustainable. Something needed to be done,” Bull says.

“The challenge is that it still doesn’t really solve the fundamental issue which is… that the rate of people bookmarking was dropping.”

“Trunk.ly, with its automation and search, is tackling that problem head on.”

“The main way to get links into delicious is still via bookmarklet. Given the high ratio of people using Facebook and Twitter, why should I manually bookmark a link if I have already retweeted it? Or liked it in my little walled garden?”

“Trunk.ly provides 10+ connectors into popular social networks. Setup once and links will start coming in automatically.”

Trunk.ly’s fancy new site hits the spot with bookmarkers

Trunk.ly is no stranger to a relaunch itself. The company recently splashed out on a new site boasting all sorts of whizbangery.

“When we looked at how people were using the old site, we realised that we weren’t doing a very good job of helping users get the most out of what we have to offer. It was really common for people to ask us for things that we had already implemented, but they just couldn’t discover them in the UI.”

“We also had a problem with people who signed up but then never did anything with the site. They’d heard about us, they’d given us an email address and a password, but they never crossed that barrier to actually ‘doing’ anything with us.”

“The new launch has solved most of these problems really well. For example, we’ve had about a 100% increase in the number of users that successfully connect Trunk.ly to Twitter or Facebook over where we used to be. People understand what we do and we’re much better at helping them to do it.”

The future according to Trunk.ly

So now that the new site’s done and dusted, what’s next for the Trunk.ly team?

“Just generally keep doing what we’re doing, but build Trunk.ly to be the easiest way to discover ‘deep’ content too.”

“When you use Trunk.ly, our research shows the average user captures and remember more content than ever before and it’s all right there at your fingertips to search.”

“As just one example, [co-founder] Alex had used Delicious for years and saved about 1,800 links – inside 12 months he’s collected 9000+ on Trunk.ly.”

“It’s this amazing knowledge-base of the content that interests you; it’s like your own personal Google of the best bits of the internet.”

An introduction to Trunk.ly