So you're an avid user of classifieds portals, and you routinely visit several of them.
Now, what do you do when you find an interesting ad? How do you keep track of it? How do you share it with friends or family? Let's see a few possibilities:
1. Spreadsheet
No. Please. Don't tell me you're copying the ads' addresses into a spreadsheet! Actually, I've seen people doing that for real. If you do so, please at least use an online spreadsheet (like via Google Docs, Microsoft Office Online or similar), and stop sending Excel files to yourself from your work PC to your home PC via email. Or on a
floppy disk?
2. Good ol' email
Sending the ads links to yourself or to a friend by email is probably the most common way to store and share one's findings. But if you're doing it, you've certainly experienced the chaos that quickly results: some emails contain several links, others mention only one, you don't remember what ad you've already sent to yourself, etc. And finding out which link has already been shared with friends isn't easy. Actually, it quickly becomes a nightmare.
3. Browser bookmarks
Using the bookmarking feature of your browser is a nicer way to go. It's quick, built-in and... not so convenient. If you're a power-user and set things up so that you store your bookmarks in the cloud, it's still not easy to share them with friend or to comment them. Besides, your work computer might not allow you to setup the browser accordingly, which will probably put you back to solution 2 if you want to retrieve your favorites from your home PC or other device.
4. Portal's "favorite/bookmark" function
Nowadays, almost every classifieds portal (with
some notable exceptions) allows its users to save their favorites into a local account or to "send to friend" via email. While the latter makes us bounce back to solution 2 and therefore is more a pain than a solution, the "mark as favorite" feature may look better. But it's a short joy. Yes, it makes it easy to keep trackl of your favorite ads. For this particular portal. But if you're browsing the ads, you most probably do it on several portals, right? Right. So you quickly end up either with a set of favorites on each portal, or - even more confusing - with a mix of that and of solutions 2 or 3. No good.
5. Logbee
I'll admit it right away, I might be a tiny little bit biased. But there's a way out of that classifieds chaos. Get yourself a free account at
logbee.com, install the
logmarklet or
our Chrome extension and off you go! Whatever the classifieds portal, you can store your favorite ads by just clicking on the logmarklet. This will save a variety of info about the ad, including title, description, pictures, etc. (Some portals even
optimize their ads for Logbee, making your life easier) There's of course a direct link to the original page for you to access it quickly, and you'll even get a screenshot of the page for your archives, should the ad be removed later. Besides, you can organize your favorites into different 'logbooks', which then can be shared with friends. Annotating and rating the ads is then a breeze. Since it's not portal-dependant, a logbook can contain ads from different websites: wherever you find something interesting, log it and voilà! To know more, please check
these detailed examples.
So? How do you now keep track of your favorite classified ads?
No comments:
Post a Comment