What happened to Look Later?

Posted on August 3, 2007
Filed Under online bookmarking, web 2.0 |

I was really disappointed by the recent meltdown and disappearance of the bookmarking site LookLater. It was intended to serve as sort of a “inbox” for links that you wanted look at later (hence the name). I used it as a temporary holding cell for links that I wanted to check out in greater detail or refer back to, but that I wasn’t ready to commit to my del.icio.us or Simpy account. It had a little browser plugin that you could just click on to save. Just one step and then you could go about your business.

A few weeks ago I logged in to refer to my collection of links and they were gone. My account was still there, but almost a year’s worth of saved links weren’t. Most had been saved elsewhere, but I was still bummed. I emailed the address for support but never heard anything. Since then they’ve clearly had all sorts of tech issues–I got PHP database errors, 404 ’site not found’ errors and most recently what appears to be an incomplete function that is supposed to “refresh me to the welcome page” but never does.

This is obviously the risk you run when you trust your data to a free service, particularly in the very fluid Web 2.0 marketplace. Still, its a shame–with all of the cookie cutter “online bookmarking” services out there LookLater seemed to have the potential to find a niche as an intermediary between the more full featured bookmarking sites and browser bookmarking or history function.

Since then I’ve started using Google Notebook for my bookmark “holding cell”. Its at least run by a company that probably isn’t going anywhere anytime soon….

LookLater

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