DemoGirl

Futz.me gives you an easy way to send yourself reminders, links you want to revisit, and even images right from your address bar.  You can have items sent to your email address or via text message.  Anything you want to send to your email or phone can be sent by simply adding Futz.me/yourusernamehere before the URL or text in your address bar.

All this and you don’t even need to be signed into your Futz account in order to use it.  A one time sign up and you’re good to go.  When you sign up, you’ll select a username which is how Futz knows what account to send the items to.  So theoretically, since you all know my username is molzy, you could send me links or notes without even knowing my email address.  All you would have to do is type in Futz.me/molzy before whatever you want to send me and it will pop right into my inbox.  (Of course, I don’t use the email address that I used for this screencast so please don’t send me anything ).

There are a lot of ways you can use Futz.  There don’t seem to be any set rules – and that’s one of the reasons I like it  so much.

To see Futz.me in action, watch the screencast below (best viewed in HD in full screen):

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[via: Webware]

I was visiting Go2web20.net this morning and saw mention of a bookmarking service called Speedtile.
This handy little tool makes browsing through your bookmarks very easy on the eyes.  I admit it, I’m a lazy bookmarker.  My bookmark folder is a mess and half the time I don’t give my bookmarks intuitive names so they can be easily located.

Speedtile gives you a visual clue about the sites you’ve bookmarked and even has a nice layout for categories you want to use for your bookmarks.  Signup is free — just need your email address and a password and you’re in.

You can manually add bookmarks to different categories by simply entering in the URL.  If you add the firefox plugin, you can add a bookmark to your Speedtile page with a simple right-mouse-click.  When you head back over to your Speedtile page, a handy little screenshot of your bookmarked site will be visible.

Speedtile doesn’t yet offer a way to import your old bookmarks, but their Web site says they are thinking about adding this feature.  This is actually good news for me because I need a fresh start.

If you want to see Speedtile in action, click on the screencast below (best viewed in HD in full screen):

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I have a problem.  I’m addicted to real estate sites.  I’m constantly checking on what my home value is or searching to see if anyone has bought the house across the street.  If you are actually looking to buy a house or sell your house, though, Dwellicious may be a good tool for you.

Dwellicious  — like Delicious for real estate — is a real estate bookmarking site that helps you keep track of that house you saw on Craigslist or Zillow last week.  If you had an account with Dwellicious you would simply have bookmarked it –  it would have been added to your Dwellicious page which you could share with your mother who would criticize your taste.

Dwellicious is set up to work with many popular real estate sites, like Zillow, Yahoo, Craigslist, Trulia and many more. The cool thing about the site is that bookmark listings on your Dwellicious page are automatically updated whenever the property data changes — change in price, availability or the addition of photos.

Go ahead and check out the Dwellicious screencast below (best viewed fullscreen in HD):

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PageTweet allows you to shrink a URL for sharing on Twitter and other social networking sites, but also allows you to add your own 140 character message to the actual link that you’re sharing.  Your message doesn’t appear in your Twitter updates with the link, it appears on the actual site – allowing the people who click on the link to see why you brought them there in the first place.

There is nothing to sign up for and you don’t need to enter in your Twitter username and password either.  Just paste the long URL into the appropriate field on the PageTweet homepage, add a nickname (again, doesn’t have to be related to Twitter), and enter in your 140 character or less comment.  Click on “Create PT” and you’ll be given a link to share wherever you please.

When people click on the link they’ll see a toolbar at the top of the page you are sharing which displays your comment, the source of the link, as well as the number of hits it’s received.

Since it doesn’t appear that you can create an account on PageTweet, you’ll have to bookmark the link in order to keep track of how many people are viewing your link.  Actually, no sign-up is fine with me…

To see PageTweet in action, watch the screencast below (best viewed in HD in full screen):

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[via MoMB]

If you find yourself constantly bookmarking articles you find online to come back to later, then “I Need To Read This” is a handy application that you’ll probably love.  It allows you to easily find articles that you want to read later, without cluttering your bookmarks folder.

There’s not much of a learning curve here – just add the two “I Need To Read This” bookmarklets to your bookmarks toolbar.  Whenever you find yourself too busy to read an interesting article or blog post, just click on the “I Need To Read This” bookmarklet.  Done.  It’s save in your account.  When you’re ready to read an article you saved, click on “Read an Article”.  An item from your saved list will appear.  You can continuously click on the “Read an Article” button to jump to the next item.

To see I Need to Read This in action, watch the screencast below (best viewed in HD in full screen):

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[via Lifehacker]

Start.io allows you to create a custom homepage, filled with links to all of your favorite Websites and blogs.  You can customize the way your page looks and even choose to be notified when a site you have listed has new content.

When you create your start.io account, you’ll choose a username which will be included in your homepage URL.  From there, all you need to do is create groups and add links to each group.  For example, I created a group called “Music” and added links to my Blip.fm account, MixTape.me, and Pandora.  When I click on my home button in my browser (I set my start.io page as my homepage) I’ll now have access to all of my favorite Websites and blogs.  I can click on a link and be brought to Twitter, Facebook, etc.  You can also choose to have start.io put a little marker next to any of the sites that have new content since the last time you visited.  It doesn’t give you a preview – it just lets you know that there’s something new to look at.

You can customize the way your page looks with one of their available themes and, if you’re so inclined, edit the CSS to give it more of a personal touch.  You can also create your own theme from scratch.

The only beef I have with start.io is that when I click on “Logout” it brings me to another page which states, “Are you sure you want to leave?”.  Yes, I’m quite sure I want to leave which is why I clicked on Logout to begin with.  It’s a very minor detail, and I’m afraid that start.io is receiving a lashing from me because of all of the other sites that do this as well…I just can’t keep my mouth shut anymore.

Other than that, I’m quite happy having start.io set as my homepage .

To see start.io in action, watch the screencast below (best viewed in HD in full screen):

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[via Download Squad]

If you’re a social networking addict and love to spy on see what sites your friends are hanging out on and what sites they’re bookmarking, then SocialU is an Adobe Air Application that you’ll probably dig.  I didn’t know what else to think when I first installed SocialU other than, “omg, it’s seriously a browser where social networking sites live”.  It’s more than that but it took me some time to figure out exactly what to do, because there’s a lot going on.

I first learned of SocialU last night when the infamous “Paisano” sent me an invite.  Before reading anything else I have to say, I would check out his much more in depth review on Mashable here.

After you install SocialU, you can set up a profile with all of the social networking sites you belong to.  Every time you click on one of your sites, it opens in a new tab.  From there, you’ll need to log in and then use it just like you would in any other browser.  But SocialU adds the ability to comment, rate, and bookmark sites as well.  Everything you publicly favor or rate will show up in a type of news feed so other users can check out what sites you like.  Does any of this sound familiar?  You’ll also know which of your friends are online because their profile picture will be highlighted in green.  If you’re viewing someone elses profile, any social networking site they are logged into will also be highlighted.  I didn’t see any way to opt out of this option but would love the ability to do so.

SocialU also pays you (think monopoly money) for participation.  You can buy your friends gifts, rent yourself an apartment, and even buy a boat.  As a matter of fact, I just received a Canon Camcorder.  Active users will also appear under the “movers and shakers” section, which should help increase their popularity.  SocialU is currently in private beta, but you can see what it looks like in the screencast below:

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Click Here To Watch Better Quality 3m1s

Thanks Paisano!

Delicious recently relaunched with not only a much needed visual overhaul, but also adding some features that have been missing for far too long.

First of all, I have to be truthful – I was never a big delicious user to begin with.  I couldn’t get past the way it looked and not really being all that into “social bookmarking”, probably didn’t help either.  I wanted to do a screencast tour of all of the new features, but I wasn’t really sure what was new and what just looked new.  Fortunately, just as I was about to pull my hair out trying to decide what features to cover, I received a message from a fellow blogger known around the blogosphere as “Paisano” telling me about a guest post he wrote on Sarah Lacy’s blog.  I asked if he minded if I used it as a guide for my screencast and he was kind enough to say yes.  So, thank you, Paisano, for the great post!  It’s definitely worth a read as it points out the good and the bad.  (I’ve also been told that Paisano is now a regular featured columnist on Mashable, so check out his writing there too.) If you want to see the new features of Delicious 2.0, then watch the screencast below:

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Click Here To Watch Better Quality 3m20s

Readbag is a link bookmarking site that runs on Google Apps. It has quite an attractive interface and since it runs on Google Apps, you can log in using your Google account. It’s very simplistic in that it’s really just a place to store links to read later. It’s not really supposed to do the job of a regular bookmarking service because there’s no way to really organize the links or archive them into different folders. There are a couple of different ways you can add links – using their bookmarklet, by downloading the Firefox extension, or manually. You can also send links to your Google Reader but you need to have Greasemonkey installed. You can share your links on the list of popular social networking sites, post them to Twitter, and have a daily digest of links sent to your email every day at a specified time. Here’s my screencast tour of readbag:

Click Here To Watch The Screencast 2m6s

Want this screencast on your site? Click here to get the code for this and other DemoGirl screencasts!

Taboo is a Firefox Extension that allows you to easily save a tab you want to return to later. Taboo not only saves the tab but it also saves it exactly as you were viewing it. For example, if you were in the middle of reading a long blog post and needed to close the tab, you could save it with Taboo and then be able to return to the exact spot where you left off. It also saves any form fields you may have been filling in. All of your saved tabs are displayed as screenshots and you can view them in a grid format or on a calendar, so you can see what you saved on a particular day. Here’s my screencast tour of Taboo:

Click Here To Watch The Screencast 2m21s

Want this screencast on your site? Click here to get the code for this and other DemoGirl screencasts!

[via Lifehacker]