Quick Link: historio.us

I found a great new service via Smashing Magazine today: historio.us. It’s a bookmarking service with some seriously impressive twists.

I’ve been using Delicious with Delibar for quite a while now. A while ago, I stopped archiving every web page I thought I might need someday (yes, I used to do that) because I’ve realized that Google’s current speed and accuracy have made my local data store obsolete. That’s a longer post for another time. The problem that arises when relying purely on web search is knowing what information you need, knowing that you’ve seen it before, but not being able to piece together the search to lead to that specific post or page. Delicious tags help tremendously, but nothing beats a full-text search. Limit that search to selected items from your own history, and you’ve got an amazing memory enhancer.

Historio.us lets you bookmark and tag pages, and then stores a cached version of the page and a full-text index. It’s a lot like HistoryHound, which I wrote up for TUAW a while back, but it offloads the bandwidth, processing and storage requirements to the cloud.

There are two things I’d love to see improve:

• I wish the search was a little more savvy. It does well, especially with “tags:” searches combined with keywords, but fails to handle fuzzy matches very well. Substituting “other” for “another” can lead to entirely different results.
• I wish the API would let me pull recent bookmarks the way I do with Delicious for local tagging purposes — not a huge deal.

The Historio.us bookmarklet is simple and effective, and the current API does have everything you need for creating extensions and addons for bookmarking. The bookmarklet functions much like the Instapaper bookmarklet, and you can trigger it on any page to effortlessly add the page to your index.

You can also publish a personal search so that others can search your bookmarked pages, and for paid subscribers there’s a “read later” feature that lets you mark pages as unread, much like Pinboard.

Historio.us has a free version, but it’s lacking many of the more interesting features (like Read Later). You can get the full version for $2.99/month or an annual fee of $19.95. Seems worth it to me, so I’m going to give it an extended trial and see how things go.