Kippt's New Redesign Brings Out The Content

    Kippt has realeased a big new update, keeping their bookmarking and indexing services powerful, but presenting your links in a fresh new way.

    The first thing you’ll notice about the new redesign is how visual it’s become. Gone is a bland list of text-based links, instead the new design brings out the images and video stills that make the content you’re saving memorable. As they say in their blog announcement, “Storing a link in itself isn’t valuable – it should be the content.”

    “For my use-case, I tend to go around the web and follow designers and collect UI screenshots and inspiration images. There generally isn’t a good way to do that. I used to use Evernote, but it feels too heavy or weird to copy-paste the image from a website. And it looks quite horrible. So we wanted to make basically a nice and easy way to find and save anything for later,” says Kaari Saarinen, co-founder of Kippt.

    One thing that is notable about their redesign is that they didn’t move deeper into social side of their app. Their service allows for sharing and following of other people, but Saarinen tells us they’ve started and stayed with what’s valuable to the single user. “But the social makes it sometimes better,” he says.

    It’s fun to follow other people’s ‘good reads’ Kippt folder, but these social features have business value as well. Startups, as well as smaller teams in bigger companies using Kippt to save tech and design inspiration and teachings. It’s handy because sometimes you need to save and share some links with notes, but it’s a little too much to make an email about it. Kippt becomes that quick and static place to save these outside sources and still stay up-to-date.

    “Basically if you need to do anything with information, or visual things, Kippt can make your life easier,” Saarinen tells us.

    Some types of web content, like Github repos, aren’t very visual. So for some the most popular uses of their service they’ve built custom tiles. For Github, they present the name, description, and all the obvious stuff (while also indexing the ReadMe file), and then present the background color based on the language. Ruby has a red background, while Javascript has an orange tile. It’s a small thing, but it’s handy and nice to look at.

    Last week Dmitri gushed over Dragdis’ drag-and-drop UI for bookmarking anything. It’s definitely an interesting bookmarking service, but I find Kippt’s bookmarket easy enough. On top of that, Kippt is growing in new ways through their API, where desktop and phone apps are taking advantage of the platform.

    Kippt has been one of Helsinki’s sweetheart startups since the Saarinen and Jori Lallo were accepted into YCombinator in the Summer 2012 class.

    The following video shows it all off pretty well – and features music by Phantom, a band led by two Finnish entrepreneurs – Tommi Koskinen of AudioDraft and Hanna Toivonen of Mukava Music.