The Last Podcast

New bookmarking services don’t usually get me very excited, but Mento, developed by Gregor Hochmuth, is doing a bunch of very interesting things. Most importantly, besides being a very well-thought out bookmarking service in itself, it acts as a conduit for pushing your bookmarks out to other services, including FriendFeed (they look like just links you share via FF’s own bookmarklet), Facebook, Ma.gnolia, and Tumblr. Also interesting is Mento’s ability to notify you directly on Twitter when anything new happens in your Mento network.

Just a few days ago, they also announced integration with screenshot service Skitch (Mac only).

Unlike the disappointing FriendBinder I reviewed over the weekend, Mento features a robust social networking back end, with the ability to add friends and see their bookmarks, as well as a ‘channel’ feature which allows you to share items with like-minded users through hashtags (see screenshot for a selection of top level channels).

Some more thoughts:

1. Mento is already very feature rich, with all the functions you expect form a bookmarking service in place
2. Sending all your links to Twitter might be rather annoying to your Twitter followers. I don’t expect to activate this anytime soon.
3. Some basic Digg/FriendFeed like features are available, such as adding ‘pluses’ (think ‘likes’) and commenting functions.
4. Mento has a direct messaging function built in.
5. You can use both a bookmarklet to easily share on Mento, or you can install enxtentions for both Firefox and IE.

One aspect where Mento really stands out for me is in its ability to filter and customize what I see in my feed of shared items from friends (the ‘Mento Mix’). You can black- and white-list items according to specific keywords, you can include or exclude ‘friends-of-friends’ posts, as well as videos and images.

Overall, I think Mento is a winner and is probably going to become my default bookmarking engine thanks to its ability to cross-post to FriendFeed and Delicious at the same time (now if only I could post to the l33t reddit from here directly as well).

Right now, Mento is still in a private beta mode, but I have six invites to give away (first come, first serve). Just send me an email at frederic AT lastpodcast.net and I will send you one ASAP.

p.s. if you have some extra time, Corvida and Chris took a look at Mento for the Social Networker podcast.