Mento, now in public beta, is a link-sharing and tagging website, similar to Del.icio.us or Pownce, with expanded functionality to create conversations around the link sharing. Creator and CEO Greg Hochmuth took a few minutes to explain how Mento is different and to share his vision for business users. Look for an upcoming Sazbean review of Mento. Greg was kind enough to provide a number of invites to Mento for our readers.
How do you see people using Mento for business? What functions do you feel are attractive to the business audience? What additional functionality are you planning that may be of interest for business use?
Greg: Our vision for Mento has three parts: at the core, it should be the central place for you to share, manage and discover links — with a strong emphasis on people you know and trust. In the current release of Mento, the first part of that vision is the most complete one and focuses on the casual, personal exchange of links among friends.
The second part and third part, which are now under active development, extend that use case in more professional and structured. In our planning, they are indeed targeted at businesses and knowledge workers. Mento will enhance the collaborative nature of its link sharing capabilities so that it will be easy for workgroups to gather links in a secure environment, discuss and annotate those links, and make them fully searchable (“re-findable”). Mento’s current “private groups” feature gives a hint of this direction and it will be vastly improved with the next release, which we have scheduled for early fall.
The third part of our vision will open Mento as a platform for publishers and businesses who want to create a branded, editorial stream of links for interested subscribers. Imagine a health care provider that publishes a weekly digest of relevant health links — or a business publication that selects the day’s highlights of industry analyses. Mento will give such publishers easy tools for compiling, editing and publishing such link streams while providing end users with a variety of subscription and personalization options.
Ultimately, our goal is to help our users manage their incoming information streams more effectively, connect with relevant content (that they wouldn’t find otherwise), and make it easy to share what they discover. Although we’re far from that goal, Mento’s tools will increasingly be valuable to business users who depend on relevant and manageable information on a daily basis.
The ability to share links with friends and coworkers on Facebook, Del.icio.us, Tumbler, Twitter, Magnolia, Friend Feed, etc. is very useful. Being able to import bookmarks from these and other services is very important to business users (and bloggers) who may already have a “wealth” of links invested in those services. Will you be adding the ability to import links from other services? And if so, when do you expect this functionality to be available?
Greg: A feature for importing links is surely in the works. In building the initial set of features, we focused mostly on “new” links that you find and want to share on a daily basis. We held back on importing links because we knew that Mento still needed better tools for managing larger collections of links. Once those are in place, we’ll gladly welcome users who want to keep their entire link archive on Mento. This will likely coincide with the release of our upgraded collaboration features that I talked about earlier.
Your service is very similar to Pownce. What do you see as your key differentiators from their service?
Greg: Pownce is a well-designed service and has a great team behind it — we like them a lot. Yes, Pownce is similar to Mento because of its feature to send links to friends — but it isn’t very different from instant messaging in that respect and it doesn’t make those shared links more manageable. Because Pownce also does file sharing and event publishing, we feel that it can focus less on the specific needs of sharing and saving just links. Mento tells who clicked on your links (so that you can create a conversation) and who visited a page together with you; it lets you create channels and use tags for your archive, personalization and higher relevancy; and it integrates much more with other services you may already use like delicious, Facebook or Twitter. And then of course, there is the screenshot feature, which has been a run-away success with our users (we recently released a Mac-friendly version by integrating with Skitch)
Being able to share a Mento feed on a blog or company website via a widget is also important to business users. Do you have any plans to add this functionality? And if so, when will it become available?
Greg: Indeed, we plan to release both widgets and a public API in the coming months. The API will be delicious-compatible so that you can use any delicious-based tool for managing and working with your Mento links.
How do you envision people using the ability to add screenshots to saved links with Firefox?
Greg: It’s been the feature that our users have loved the most so far. Many say that it makes it easier for them to highlight the important, noteworthy part of the page that they’re sharing, to “crop” a larger image on the page, or to give a better impression of the overall experience (especially for dynamic interfaces like Maps or Flash-driven content). Personally speaking, I also find that it helps make my links more memorable, which will be even more useful once we add alternate ways of exploring your archives and browsing larger aggregates of Mento links.
Why did you decide to create Mento? What are your plans for the future?
Greg: There is more and more noise in our information environment every day and it’s getting harder and harder to filter the meaningful signals. We’re on a mission to make your daily information streams more manageable and more meaningful. With that in mind, there is a lot left to build and a lot of room for improvement.
You seem to get quite a bit done with a very small development team. What’s your secret?
Greg: There is no secret other than dedication and knowing what’s important to us. We think that we’re slow, to be honest — we would love to iterate at the speed of thought but until that’s possible, we’ll work long hours and enjoy what we’re building!
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