I love Twitter. I love spamming Twitter. Sometimes though, it all just moves too fast, and it is an absolute nightmare trying to search through my tweets trying to find links. I certainly ain’t going to make the effort to delicious each and every single one [or save them manually through some other tool], and thankfully for the lazy like me, trunk.ly exists.
Trunk.ly automagically collects the links you share online … and makes them searchable.
Once you set up connections to your social networks like Twitter and Facebook, trunk.ly will start indexing all the links you share [and have shared for quite a while] through these sites. It’s easy, requires no upkeep, and provides a clutter-free way to look through links you’ve shared.
Search
Now, onto their search. I know it’s still a relatively new product [I only heard about it in the wake of the delicious demise], but, it sucks >.< As of now, it searches only by “relevance”, and while it works well on occasion, other times you’re left wondering what kind of search algorithm they’re using. I was actually quite shocked that the default search criteria was not simply date / recently shared.
Tagging
Trunk.ly automatically converts Twitter hashtags into their own form of searchable tags. This is handy, and definitely helps before the aforementioned, YMMV search, but I’d like it to go a step further and automatically tag links based on their domain. Hell, I’d even spend a good five minutes doing it, because I’m pretty sure that a LOT of the links I share are from maybe, ten or so different sites.
Trunk.ly see “techcrunch” or “thenextweb” in the domain name, tag it as “tech”. It sees “youtube” or “vimeo”, tag it as “video”. I’ve customised twitter in a way that I rely HEAVILY on lists, and I have lists for my Deloitte Online tweeps, tech, music, tv and movie news. It’s easier to digest and look for information this way, and I’m pretty sure it would be handy to search and categorise links like this too.
I’d love to be able to just post a link to “Tech news stories I’ve shared this week”.
The whole “Follow” thing
I do not want to follow people on trunk.ly. Nor do I want people to sign up to trunk.ly so I can see their links. I know that trunk.ly requires users to connect their accounts to share their data / links, but it would be a million times better if there was some way that I can see the links of everyone I follow on Twitter.
At the moment, I only see trunk.ly as a tool for me [a very useful one at that!], and not a social network by any means.
c0up 
Thanks for the great feedback – we really appreciate you taking the time to sit down and write about what you like AND don’t like about the site.The search is a challenging area (and one we can do a lot better at). It’s interesting you want it by date, the very early versions were sorted by date and we switched because of the user feedback to relevance. Offering both is a technical challenge, but is something we should consider.Tagging – yes, totally agree. Most of the of those features are on the roadmap. The "technews stories I’ve shared this week" is an interesting idea. You can do this, http://trunk.ly/c0up/?t=sxsw at the moment, but it’s ALL links, and only those tagged. Would you want to do this by tag, or by search (or some other filter like Domain)?The "Follow" thing gets mixed feedback (some people love it). You certainly don’t have to choose to follow people, so in that sense it’s opt in. We’ve got some big plans in this space which we hope make this a lot more powerful and useful. Unfortunately following everyone / not forcing them to sign up isn’t practical because of several of the APIs and various "per user" limits etc.We could theoretically allow you to import your whole Twitter timeline, it’s a split at the moment on which way this one goes – some people say yes, others wouldn’t use it. We’re not coming down on a hard decision either way yet. We’ll keep collecting the feedback and see where and how it ends up.Appreciate the comments,Cheers,Tim
Hey Tim, cheers for the detailed comment.Yeh, the search is a weird one. I think the added fact that the relevance seems broken at times makes me want a search by date option. Great to hear that the automated tagging is in the roadmap, and as you say, the follow thing is optional, and I find trunk.ly very useful as a personal tool, but I look forward to what you guys come up with next!
Hi, My name is Dave and I would also like to bring your attention to Trunkler – an iOS client I built for Trunk.ly. It’s super easy to use. Now you can get all the goodness of Trunk.ly directly from your iPhone or iPod Touch. Here’s the link: http://trunkler.com