I have three bookmarklets currently in my Chrome browser (seen below) and I wish I had a few more.

I renamed them for my own satisfaction, but the three add-ons above are for Instapaper, Boxee and The Fancy and they are really simple to add and understand.

I’ve been using the bookmarklets for a little while, but am still in the adoption stages of trying to break my stubborn internet-behavior and increase the frequency with which I access them. As many in Startuplandia know, behavioral changes are slow, even when the button is literally staring you in the face! Nonetheless, they are rapidly becoming part of my routine because the benefits are really worthwhile.

The Instapaper and Boxee buttons work for straightforward content-shifting purposes, perfectly explained here, and they significantly enrich my digital day-to-day. Experiencing great content on the appropriate hardware and at your own discretion is critical to repeating the behavior. Longer thought-pieces get “instapaper’d”  to my Kindle, which is an aesthetic and distraction-less device for absorbing that I love. Meanwhile, great video and audio content gets Boxee’d to the HD screen and sound system because I too often dismiss great art that just looks and sounds terrible on my portable net-book. The result is a “win win” as my work hours are less distracted (more productive) and my leisure hours are richer; despite the fact that work and leisure are beginning to look very similar.

The Fancy, however, is a slightly different story and I wish there were a few more of these buttons available (and I expect they will come). To explain: when Etsy, for example, started gaining momentum, it was fun and manageable to find interesting products and follow vendors you liked. These days however, despite the site’s explosion in quality and variety, it seems almost happenstance that you wind up on a certain selection of hats and not another. And this overload problem is certainly not unique to hand-made goods.

With the ever-increasing noise on the internet, the problem of finding things you really like (content or goods) will probably get worse before it gets better, but a service like The Fancy highlights one method for fine-tuning the frequency. Let friends (physical and digital) show you personally-curated items and make the discovery process that much easier and more relevant.

Avoiding a later discussion more focused on curated content, the basic point is that The Fancy has found a perfect tool, bookmarklets, for improving search/discovery and simplifying the behavioral impediments to participation. There are numerous niche sites and services for which this type of tool makes sense and I think more developers should consider implementation. Users can only open so many tabs in their browsers before the computer slows/crashes and your precious site is lost, so give them something to slap on their toolbar and save some trouble.