The tagging and link-sharing market has no shortage of competition, but that doesn’t seem to be deterring many developers. Mento, which has just launched in an invite-only beta, is the latest to arrive on the scene, sporting a very well designed site and a number of options that make sharing links a breeze.
Beyond the features typically found on tagging sites, Mento strives to simplify sharing links with friends by allowing users to import and interact with their Facebook contacts. The site also differentiates itself by keeping track of how many times a link you’ve shared has been clicked, and which members have clicked it.
Mento can be used either with bookmarklets in your browser’s toolbar or as an extension that appears as a button (available for both Firefox and IE). The extension isn’t intrusive, but it doesn’t seem to offer much extra functionality over the bookmarklet at this point (though this will likely change in the future).
Mento’s main goal is to provide a lightweight solution for easy sharing, bookmarking, and tagging. After clicking on the bookmarklet, a small browser window pops up, asking if you’d like to Send, Save, or comment on a page. The Send form features a handy autocomplete for your contacts, though you can manually enter email addresses. The Save form leaves a bookmark and description of the page on your Mento profile page for future reference.
Mento facilitates link sharing by allowing you to publish links to del.icio.us, FriendFeed, Magnolia, Tumblr, and Twitter. There’s also a Facebook app that allows friends to view and comment on links without having to install the application themselves (a rarity these days).
Mento’s CEO Gregor Hochmuth is quick to acknowledge the obvious comparison to del.icio.us, explaining that Mento takes the del.icio.us model and improves on it by including robust sharing support. In practice, the sharing functionality does work well, especially when you’ve imported your friends from Facebook. But a number of other sites, such as Zigtag and Yoono, have very similar offerings. Only time will tell if Mento will melt under the pressure, or if it’ll stay fresh, cool, and full of life.
You can get one of the 500 invites here.
Looks like an awesome service!
interesting concept. i got my beta request in. cant wait to get started and spread the coolness around with friends. thanks for this techcrunch.
terrible typo on the homepage
Just signing up with TC referral
Send me invite
No-one has really nailed the bookmarking / organization / sharing thing perfectly yet in my opinion. Ma.gnolia is way to slow, del.icio.us has a terrible interface and feels like a hassle to use, Zigtag is on a good way but has work to do…
As long as that’s the case I think there is good chance for a small start-up to get it right. If they can stay small, focused and away from funding (avoiding the pressure) for a while they might have a chance to tumble the Goliaths of bookmarking.
Dexter, follow the link in the end of the post to get an invite.
share invite please
i see only complexity
Let’s see if this gonna be a useful link for users.
I really need such solution, hopefully this one will satisify me
cool i realy like mento
owww
the invitation is out
“Make your links viral! Simply upload them to our diet coke widget.”
When I was first introduced to Mento I was sceptical, but after seeing Mento integration with facebook, friendfeed and , most importantly, plain old email I decided to give it a try. Long story short I’m now a daily user of Mento.
http://www.tech-exposed.com
So is this a social networking site like Stumble or Digg?
Guess I better dig deeper and explore the benefits
.info?
Sorry to whine here, and I know this is a crowded space, but it’s pretty surprising to me that our site, Faves.com, didn’t get mentioned as a comparison in this article. Faves.com (formerly BlueDot.us) is certainly in the “top 3″ social bookmarking sites with over 1 Million visitors each month (larger than any of the other sites mentioned here except for delicious), and also can “send” links to friends via email, can show you all your friends recent bookmarks on one page, and can be syndicated via our widget, FriendFeed and RSS feeds.
It would be nice to see TechCrunch articles with more analysis and comparison to the currently available products than this article provides. I’m also not seeing the healthy does of skepticism that we usually see from posts by Michael, for example. Where’s the value to your readers if you just parrot the releases startup companies are sending you?
6: I agree wholeheartedly - as all of them are doing very similar things - but a little differently - different UI - integrating with different partners…However they are all missing the point
Not to give too much away at this point - but the guys who come and win will be those that understand the need for content and give the user the next logical and vertical step on what to do with the links. Stay tuned as something interesting will be unveiling soon enough.
What about Diigo (http://www.diigo.com)? It seems to have all the features of Mento and more. I was a Furl user then moved to Del.icio.us and now I primarily use Diigo to save links and have them auto-replicated to Del.icio.us.
I have to admit that I really like retrieving my links on Del.icio.us with the url based system (for example: http://del.icio.us/bluecockatoo/color+tools retrieves all my links with the tags color and tools). I don’t have to load a page and type something in a search box or click on a link cloud to find what I’m looking for. I’m not aware of another service that does that.
Jason, this description of Mento sounds more like paid review if not advertisement. Some of the sentences in your “review” also look like provided by Mento.
Why is this noteworthy?
Do you need friends to use it?
Bad bad logo.
Looks like an angry evil smiley.
Is it the anti-Google? “Just do Evil”?
G.
looks interesting, but I agree with 24…bad logo
I would like an invite please
Very good service! And the screenshot feature is the best ever!
I would like an invite please