Notado 07/2023 Update: API Price Gouging, New Services, Archiving
The last few months have seen a flurry of changes on major social media websites like Twitter and Reddit with regards to API access. This has also resulted in a number of new competitors seeing rapid growth and becoming new hubs for online discussion.
Let’s start with the first point: you will always be able to save Reddit comments and Tweets to Notado by highlighting and saving a text selection. This doesn’t require any API access or scraping, and it will always work because it only relies on what is visible in your browser.
However, as current users will know, Notado offers a deeper, more ergonomic integration with both Reddit and Twitter (and many other services), which allows users to save comments and Tweets using permalinks. In a desktop browser, this is as simple as a right click on a link. On mobile, this is as simple as a share action on a link.
In this increasingly adversarial atmosphere between social media companies and developers of services and applications which aim to give more control to users over the retrieval of their history of liked/favourited/bookmarked posts, I won’t detail the exact mechanisms that currently enable this deeper integration. I will however, assure you that everything is continuing to work as expected and should continue to work as expected in the near future.
On the second point: Notado has added this same level of deeper ergonomic integration, allowing users to save posts using only permalinks, for both Lemmy and BlueSky, and work is currently under way add Threads to this list as well.
The final point that I would like to touch on is archiving. I’ve had many users ask me about the potential for introducing support for full webpage archiving to Notado. I have been exploring this for some time, and it is a feature that is very hard to get right.
Although Pinboard advertises this feature, the general consensus is that it just doesn’t work. I was discussing Pinboard’s archiving feature with a friend who may well be one of Pinboard’s biggest users this past weekend, and after some digging it turned out that only links they had saved more than 5 weeks ago had been recorded as archived, but nothing that was reported as archived was actually accessible.
The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine is probably the best archiver out there, and there is no way that anything that I try to come up with will ever be better in any way.
Starting today, users with an active paid subscription can rest assured that the source websites of their saved highlights, comments and other posts will be archived by the best web archiver known to humanity.
Items in your library will now have a “Web Archive” link which you can follow to view a fully archived version of the source website on the Wayback Machine. Notado will make sure that there is at least one archived copy of everything you save available on the Wayback Machine. New content that you save should have a “Web Archive” link available within 24-48 hours.
If you haven’t used Notado before and this sounds interesting to you, feel free to read more about Notado’s content-first bookmarking approach and try the 30-day free trial (no billing details required).
After the 30-day free trial, Notado is very moderately priced at $1.99/month, and has only a single tier in which all features (archiving, tagging rules, smart feeds, full-text search, unlimited highlights and comments support etc.) are included.