With the world of Web pages turning to a Web of streams, there becomes a battle to find value in those streams and capture points in time, sharing with your social graph. Between the medium of full-length blogging and more instantaneous tweeting or status updates is forming a lightweight medium, featuring products like Tumblr, Posterous and an intriguing entrant, Amplify, which is built to let its members post short updates, engage with the community and more importantly, clip favorite pages or Web sites along the way for discussion. Showing steady traffic and user growth over the last year, Amplify is now branching out to mobile devices with a mobile bookmarklet, letting you post updates from your iPhone, iPad or Android handset.
Amplify's New Mobile Clipping Service
One of the biggest drawbacks of surfing the Web on an iPad for me is the consistent reminder that its user agent tells downstream sites that it is a mobile device, and not a full-fledged computer, bringing me mobile versions of favorites like Google Reader and Twitter, for instance. Similarly, some site's widgets and bookmarklets don't behave in a standard way. But Amplify's new code is built to take advantage of the new world of advanced mobile devices and touch screens.
Using Amplify Mobile to Share a Link to Sports Blog Nation
If you go to http://amplify.com/m-bookmarklet, being rolled out this morning, you can now clip and share pages and posts you find interesting and share them downstream from your mobile device. It's not the most advanced technology I've ever seen, but it absolutely works. Just add a JavaScript bookmarklet to your browser, and tap it when you come across something interesting.
As with other Bookmarklet-driven services, Amplify offers you the option to share the URL and make notes about that share, which are added to your dedicated page. For example, my own feed is here: http://louisgray.amplify.com/. You can also "clip" from the shared page, which grabs not just selected text, but even graphics included, just as if you had clipped a newspaper or magazine article - which is very nice.
Clipping Twitter's Blog Post And Selecting Text on Amplify
For example, last night, when I shared Twitter's latest post about uptime struggles on Amplify Mobile, I was prompted to clip the article, tapped twice with my finger on paragraphs I wanted to include, and Amplify went above the call of duty to include the links to the company's Status blog and @Support. The resulting share (here) is displayed elegantly and captures downstream impact of likes, comments and retweets from the community.
Amplify's Clips Are Clean, Include Comments, Graphics, Link to Source
Amplify's mobile solution doesn't have to be a dedicated iPhone or Android app - and mobile clipping promises to be the beginning of their off-desktop strategy. But it absolutely works great, and it seems they have an engaged community looking to see what you share. If you're an active bookmarker on Delicious, or have previously enjoyed using Bookmarklets on FriendFeed and other services, Amplify is very interesting indeed. You can of course connect to your extended social graph from Twitter and Facebook, so make sure you're not Amplifying the news alone. I'm here: http://louisgray.amplify.com/.