Do one thing, and do it awesomely … Gimmebar!

From time to time you see a company come along that offers a simple product or service, and when they launch it just works.

The last time (that I can recall) when this happened was when I first used Dropbox. Download this little app and you got a 2GB drive in the cloud. And it worked on my Windows PC, on my Ubuntu PC, on my Android phone.

It just worked!

That was a while ago. And since then I’ve installed tons of software (and uninstalled 99% of it because it just didn’t work).

Last week I found Gimmebar.

There was no software to install, I just created an account on their web page. And it just worked!

What is Gimmebar? They consider themselves the 5th greatest invention of all time and they call themselves “a data steward”. I don’t know what that means. They also don’t tell you what the other 4 inventions are.

Here is how I would describe Gimmebar.

Gimmebar is a web saving/sharing tool that allows you to save things that you find interesting on the web in a nicely organised personal library in the cloud, and share some of that content with others if you so desire. They have something about saving stuff to your Dropbox account but I haven’t figured all of that out yet.

It has a bookmarklet for your browser, click it and things just get bookmarked and saved into your account.

But, it just worked!

I made a couple of collections, made one of them public and one of them shared.

If you share a collection it automatically gets a URL.

And that URL automatically supports an RSS Feed!

And they also backup your tweets, (I don’t give a crap about that).

So, what’s missing?

• Some way to import all your stuff (from Google Reader)
• An Android application (more generally, mobile application for platform of choice …)
• The default ‘view’ on the collections includes previews; I will have enough crap before long where the preview will be a drag. How about a way to get just a list?
• Saving a bookmark is right now at least a three click process; once you visit the site, click the bookmarklet and you get a little banner on the bottom of the screen, you click there to indicate whether you want the page to go to your private or public area, then you click the collection you want to store it in. This is functional but not easy to use.

I had one interaction with their support (little feedback tab on their page). Very quick to respond and they answered my question immediately.

On the whole, this feels like my first experience with Dropbox. Give it a shot, I think you’ll like it.

Why? Because Gimmebar set out to do one thing and they did it awesomely. It just worked!