Jumptags.com Official Blog

I’ve been following posts about Jumptags around many popular blogs and it’s clear that it’s really started to pick up! Although the jumptags.com site still lacks help and documentation, most users who “invested” a bit of time exploring Jumptags have figured out how to use it and are posting their own findings as to why Jumptags is “beyond” Social Bookmarking.

KillerStartups - Social Bookmarking on Steroids
Download Squad - Jumptags, a little ahead of social bookmarking

There are a lot of posts explaining how Jumptags lets you collect, manage, store, share and distribute bookmarks, rss feeds, notes, skype calls and do other cool stuff with your online resources. Yes, the interface looks good, it’s fast and yes it’s much easier to manage your bookmarks with Jumptags than with any other bookmarking service, but is that what Jumptags is all about? And why is it called Jumptags?

There is one very powerful feature in Jumptags, the one that I think sets it apart from other services and that is quite simply the ability to actually find what you bookmarked! It may seem obvious that the purpose of bookmarking a site is the ability to get to it at some time in the future. Yes, of course there is the social aspect of it – sharing and exchanging bookmarks- but isn’t it equally or sometimes even more important to be able to find a site you bookmarked? Especially when you can’t remember it’s name, address (who remembers those anyway?) or in web 2.0 speak the “tags” you used to bookmark it?

Tags are cool - they let you organise what you bookmark in loose hierarchies. Collections are also useful as they provide an extra level of meaningful grouping. But are tags and collections the best way to actually get back to what you saved?

Welcome to the Jumptags Search box! (or search boxes actually, since you can find it on both the Jumptags.com site and the Jumptags toolbar).

Once you start typing inside the Jumptags search box you will notice that results are immediately visible. Auto-complete functionality is becoming quite common but this one has an added “touch of intelligence” in order to help users narrow down the search results displayed, then simply select and finally press the “enter key” to jump to the bookmarked resource. (Is the term jump-tag making more sense now?). The more words you type, the more relevant the results you get. This is because the search terms you type are not taken as a phrase but as individual keyword searches. The search engine will look for matching entries containing all the individual keywords you type, and it will look everywhere: tags, collection names, page titles, urls, descriptions and keywords.

The more terms you type, the narrower the results. Once you are down to a few, point and click to the one you want and jump to it! That’s all there is to it. Sounds simple, but only Jumptags does it this way.

Typing “goo stats” lets me jump to my Google Analytics account

At the end of the day, the search box can become a sort of DOS command line, as our good friend Matthew blogged the other day [http://www.badlanguage.net/?p=454]. I am planning to write a separate post on the inner-workings of search, how weights are applied, and how you can turn Jumptags into a command line tool, so stay tuned.

All I wanted to do was to draw your attention to the importance of “getting to” or jumping to bookmarked resources. I think it’s one of the areas that sets Jumptags apart from “the rest” and what makes it a real productivity tool.