72 products left, but today raindrop
Hi friend 👋,
My graduation project in college was on link graphs. My team and I were in another research group, and one of the main issues we encountered was sharing the URL groupings. What I mean will become clear in a moment. Using natural language processing, we attempted to synthesize news reports from multiple news outlets in an attempt to create an unbiased summary. Although I am aware that this issue has been resolved, I recall that 13 years ago it was a promising field of study. There were dozens of academic papers to read, and each one referred us to yet another set of papers. You'd start reading, and then all of a sudden you'd have a dozen or more links to different websites popping up. You should not keep them all to yourself; rather, you should distribute them around your team members. It's fine if you want to send just the list, but we thought it could be neat to put them into a graph so we can easily spot any references we've missed and which articles are in the center.
As a result, for graduation project, we attempted to fix our own problem. It was a clever bookmark organizer that organized URLs into a tree-like graph. I already knew how to use Silverlight thanks to my internship with Microsoft's WPF team, so we decided to use it here. That's when I learned the hard way that picking the wrong technology stack might spell disaster. Despite this setback, we were able to complete the assignment and earn a passing grade in the graduation project course. I still think it could be a useful tool, and I haven't seen anything like it thus far. "Not seeing anything like that" could possibly imply that I'm mistaken; but, who knows? I've been intrigued by bookmark managers since those days, and I'd want to share my favorite with you today.
Today, raindrop is our product.
Among the many tools I've tried, I rate Raindrop as one of the better examples of a does what it says tool. Using their folder structure to generate link pools is a breeze. Therefore, it serves as a collection tool in addition to a bookmarking tool. The highlight function is quite useful for me, as I often want to remember specific passages from the articles I read. Through the use of the public URL option, link collections can be exported immediately and shared with others. Last but not least, they build the product in public. The raindrop community contributes ideas and reports bugs, and the raindrop team prioritizes development accordingly.
If you don't already have a bookmarking tool, give Raindrop a try. They have apps for almost every platform, and your browsing experience will be improved. I’m going to share raindrop file which contains all the products we talked about during this challenge.
We’ll talk again tomorrow.