My recent Gmail Labs post just had me thinking about something that always happens to me: Somebody emails or IMs me a link to something, and then I can’t find it later when I need it.  When this happens it is helpful that Gmail not only has a copy of every email I receive, but also archives all the chat sessions I have through GChat/AIM.  While it is helpful that all these conversations are archived, it isn’t necessarily a solution to this problem.  What happens to me in this situation is that I often spend a lot of time searching for the specific conversation (and the point in that conversation) where the link I’m looking for is found.

I think a fairly easy tweak on the conversation archiving idea could provide a much quicker and easier solution to this problem.  What I would like to see is a Gmail Labs feature, that simply allows me to put a small “Received Links” box in either the left or right column of my Gmail inbox (similar to the boxes that exist for labels or Gchat).  What could live in this box is just a list of all the links that I’ve been sent by contacts (not necessarily web services or mailing lists).  To prevent it from becoming too overwhelming it could even be limited by a certain time frame or number of links (for example: all the links received from contacts in the past week, or the 10 most recent links received from my contacts).  That way it could be a short list of quick access to those links your friends have sent you that you “need to check out” but “haven’t gotten around to yet.

Other possibilities for this feature might be that the user would be allowed to specify certain contacts to allow their links to show up in this quick access list, or perhaps there could be an option to flag links as they are received in an email or chat to be stored in this list for access later.

So a list of links could end up looking something like this:

http://www.apple.com/newipod

http://www.harmonix.com/beatlesrockband

http://www.webmd.com/areyousick

http://www.soccernet.com/breakingnews

http://www.youtube.com/funnyvideo

http://www.sailinganarchy.com/fastboat

If we’re looking for a certain link, often we’re probably linking for the link that *that person* sent me, so attaching names might make it a little easier to find what we’re looking for quickly.

Pope – http://www.apple.com/newipod

Fitzy – http://www.harmonix.com/beatlesrockband

Tara – http://www.webmd.com/areyousick

Marc – http://www.soccernet.com/breakingnews

Doody – http://www.youtube.com/funnyvideo

Jack – http://www.sailinganarchy.com/fastboat

I mentioned keeping this list of links in a small box in one of the side columns of Gmail so keeping the URLs short (and contact names as well) will help us fit the list of URLs in a side column.  But more importantly than keeping the URLs short we want to keep key information necessary to identify them as the specific link we’re searching for so we can try dropping the “http://www.” that prepends most links, which will look like this:

Pope – apple.com/newipod

Fitzy – harmonix.com/beatlesrockband

Tara – webmd.com/areyousick

Marc – soccernet.com/breakingnews

Eddie – youtube.com/funnyvideo

Jack – sailinganarchy.com/fastboat

The URLs will still probably be too long to fit in a narrow column a lot of the time, but even if they get truncated we can still see pretty relevant information:

Pope – apple.com/newipod

Fitzy – harmonix.com/beatle…

Tara – webmd.com/areyousi…

Marc – soccernet.com/break…

Eddie – youtube.com/funny…

Jack – sailinganarchy.com/…

I think for the basic list idea this works pretty well.  There’s a lot of fine-tuning that can be done to take advantage of the dates links were sent, etc. but I think overall this would do a good job of putting links you’ve received but “haven’t gotten around to” at your fingertips.  I think enough users remember enough about the URL (the main site name, e.g.: apple.com) to successfully find the link that pops into their head quickly.

This is clearly just a rough outline of a possible feature and needs to be revisited, but I’d love to hear and comments/criticisms/suggestions, do you think this is even useful?

I had this thought a couple months ago but never got around to sharing it, let me know what you think.

iPhone home screen feature request from Joshua J. Campoverde on Vimeo.