When you’re on the road, passing time reading up on things online from your mobile phone, it can be quite a pain in the ass to bookmark articles for later or share them with others. Smub aims to change all that by debuting a web-based tool that you can access from anywhere and lets you easily bookmark and share stuff from your mobile browser without necessarily having to register for the service.
Smub is incredibly simple to use. All you need to do when you’re browsing an article on your computer or mobile device is add “smub.it/” in front of the URL and it will take you to a page where you can bookmark the link to your Smub profile if you have one, or alternatively your favorite social bookmarking service or one of the more popular social networking services without the need for a separate account. Currently, Smub boasts e-mail support as well as direct push to Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Delicious, Digg, FriendFeed, LinkedIn, Mixx, Reddit and HelloTXT.
Smub is a very basic service, but a useful one that’s been pretty well executed. Once you’ve saved a bookmark to your Smub profile, you can set a relatively short URL which redirects to it (e.g. smub.it/robinwauters/netflix.ceo – yay, another toolbar-in-a-frame) and you can also add keyword tags and comments to the article in one swoop. You can manage your bookmarks from your account too, and share them on the services cited above later if you choose to. To get started, you can import the bookmarks from whichever browser you’re using, and you can easily pull in your friends’ contact details from Gmail, Yahoo Mail or Windows Live Hotmail to make it easier and faster for you to share ‘Smubs’ with them.
I like Smub already, and I suspect that while the team clearly wants to make sure the service is mobile-friendly (it works particularly well with the iPhone) some people will be interested in simply using it on their computers. For those, the Smub guys added a Firefox extension and toolbar which can come in quite handy if you’re using multiple social bookmarking services.
Now go smub something and tell us what you think.