Today’s thought: How to keep the context of a URL shared by a contact when bookmarking this URL? By context, I mean: meta-information that describes why you might be interested by the shared URL, who sent it to you, when, and also gives you a way to reply/annotate/comment this sharing after consumption.

Confused? Okay, let me give an example use case (which happened to me this morning):

  1. A friend sends you an email saying “you must watch this amazing documentary, it gives constructive criticism of your research approach i think: http://youtube/giheughe, what would you reply to the question at minute 16.22?“
  2. You already have several emails in your inbox with links to lengthy videos to watch. You would like to make some space in your inbox, but you don’t have time to watch these videos right now.

…and possible solutions to clear your inbox and keep a reference to URLs for later consumption:

  1. Solution 1 (no context): you “bookmark” these videos in a personal “todo-playlist” in order to watch them later. But if you do that, you lose the context of these shared URLs (i.e. for the definition of context, read above). Thus you don’t know in which mindset to watch the video and where to put feedback responding to your friend’s email.
  2. Solution 2 (webmail): if you use a good webmail (i.e. each email has its own URL, e.g. gmail.com), you can bookmark the email of your friend. This solution makes it possible to archive the email to make some space in your inbox, and to keep the context of shared URLs.
  3. Solution 3 (social-networking style): you bookmark the videos’ URLs in your “todo-playlist” (which you could also call “TV” btw), and, when you watch them, the user interface shows you the context of this shared video. E.g. the web page that embeds the video displays a frame with the name and photo/avatar of the friend who sent you this video, along with his recommendation message (e.g. the content of his email), and a link (or even a textbox) to respond. Wouldn’t that be nice? :-D