Most people ‘get’ the notion of grabbing a URL and renaming it (which is the new aha! we’re able to provide in the realm of shrinking links) to a personally memorable link. The simultaneous “save” (to a personal bookmark page) is a bonus - especially for those of us who can’t always remember exactly what we’ve named or where we’ve stored something.

When you register for a Smub account, you’re automatically saving (or bookmarking) your Smubs in a private area on Smub’s server. That gives you several cool advantages:

• You can gain access to your Smubs from any browser. So when you’re visiting mom and dad for Thanksgiving, you can log in from the ancient 386 that’s humming under the desk, keeping your dad’s legs toasty as he works around the 65 pound monitor (look! an old CRT!) on top of his desk. (That is, if the operating system supports Firefox 2 or 3, and/or IE 6,7 or 8.)
• It’s a private bookmark page, so you can save not only public Smubs, but you can store your personal pages online (for access from mom and dad’s, or anywhere you’re connected to a browser) - I have a “bank” and plenty of email account/Baseline account Smubs already. What’s great about that is that I can truly be bookmark free on my iPhone (in case I lose it) and still have access to my personal pages when I’m on the road.
• You can sort your Smubs by tag, by date, or alphabetically, so it’s easy to find a needle in a haystack even when you become a prolific “Smubber.” (Believe me, I’ve come to appreciate that capability for sure.)

As much as I can get lost in the joy of personalizing and sharing links, and sharing Smubs through the toolbar, I’ve found great solace in relying on Smub to save and sort my links, too.

And in helping me be truly, truly mobile, yet connected.

Bookmarked Smubs are easily searched, sorted

When I started on this adventure to introduce Smub to the world, I was fascinated that it worked by typing smub.it/ to the left of http://. Smub is the first to do it, and once I realized it had been done, and that it works on any browser, I wondered two things:

1. How in the heck did they think of that?
2. Why hadn’t anyone thought of that before? It’s such a simple, elegant concept that truly works the way we’ve been taught to navigate around the web - by typing in the address bar.

Since I can’t answer the second question, I had to find out what made Smub CEO Thierry Lamouline think of using the left of http:// for making a Smub? I hate to say it, but I was kind of disappointed in his answer:

It just came to him that we could.

What? (I actually asked this:) You weren’t standing atop a mountain watching a sunset when a voice spoke to you from the clouds?

Nope. It just occurred to him that we could.

Which reminded me of an article I had read recently in the New Yorker about insight (registration is required to view the whole article, which is pretty thrilling) and how the brain works when insights come to us. From the article:

“On August 5, 1949, a firefighter named Wag Dodge survived an out-of-control fire in the Mann Gulch River Valley, in Montana. In a moment of desperate insight, he devised an escape plan by igniting the ground in front of him and laying down on the smoldering embers, inhaling the thin layer of oxygen clinging to the ground.

There is something inherently mysterious about moments of insight. Dodge couldn’t explain where his idea came from.”

Apparently scientists studying the brain have found that insights are managed by the prefrontal cortex in the brain, well out of reach of our consciousness, but conducting our brain’s functions, nonetheless.

As such, Thierry came up with the idea of using a command to the left of http:// to make Smubs. And it was up to the Smub development team to make it work.

And so it does.

In an intersting new twist to verification, Technorati has asked me to place this URL into the Smub blog that I’m in the process of claiming:

<a href=”http://technorati.com/claim/pz6g3urqfd” rel=”me”>Technorati Profile</a>

A clever piece of code, I suppose, that tells it “I’m me!”

Of course, I’m dying to change it to a Smub:

<a href=http://smub.it/jlj/me!”> rel=”me”>Techorati Profile</a>

So much better. Smub.it/jlj/me!

It’s kind of scary that I’m starting to look at all URLs in Smubs…

I have come to love the Smub toolbar, which is an entirely optional, but very cool add-on to Smub’s innate capabilities, which work without any downloads or add-ons. I can use the toolbar to shortcut my way through the web.

Smub toolbar is a shortcut to any shared Smub

Using the toolbar, I can pop among my own Smubs, (typing in “bank,” for example, takes me right to my bank login page). But it gets really cool when I can share other’s Smubs from the toolbar.

Go right to any Smub that's been shared

Thierry, our CEO here at Smub, has been using Smub longer than almost anyone. He has Smubbed just about everything he’s ever wanted to share online. He’s even Smubbed Craigslist searches (more on that soon, suffice it to say, you can do so). So anytime I want to reference something he’s shared with me, I can just select “thierry” from my Smub toolbar, and type the specific Smub I want to find, and voila! I’m there.

The toolbar is currently available for Firefox or IE users.

We’re launching our blog and our Smub beta simultaneously (get used to that concept from us) today, and I thought I’d give a little overview as to how easily Smub works, to tickle the imagination.

In the upcoming the days, weeks and months, we’ll share stories of Smub, gather feedback from Smub users and generally be the fast track to the development and product teams here in Redwood City. But for now, we’re working on some introductory stuff to get everyone grounded in Smub.

Who’s Writing This Blog?

I’m Janet Johnson, and I’m extremely fortunate to work for Smub in managing our social media interactions. I’ve been in technology marketing for 24 years, and Smub is one of those tools that’s come along that has really changed the way I think about sharing information. (I wrote about that today on my personal blog, over here.) I’ll be Twittering about Smub, so please join us there. It’s so much more fun to tweet when there are people listening, right?

What is Smub?

Smub is a tool that helps people communicate information from the web to other people, in the easiest possible ways. Most people, when I’ve explained it to them, think “Oh, a link shrinking tool,” and immediately put it in that box in their brains, nicely filed away.

But Smub is much more than that. It allows you to capture any link (from any browser window - even on a smartphone, which is very, very cool) and simultaneously personalize it, bookmark it and easily share it with folks; you can easily say a smub, write it on a napkin, email, text, IM, and post it to Twitter, Facebook or MySpace. We like to think of Smub as a universal URL sharing and saving tool.

How Smub Works:

Once you register for your free Smub account, you can simply type Smub.it/ to the left of the http:// on any browser window – even on your iPhone, Blackberry or smartphone – and make a Smub.

A note about registering - choose a short, memorable Smub name, especially if you use Twitter. It’s what makes your Smubs personal. My Smubs are “Janet” and “jlj” so my Smubs come out short and sweet when I Tweet.

Smubs are contextual in Twitter

Name your Smub, tag it if you want to, (you can search all your bookmarked Smubs by tag, date, or alphabetically) and choose whether you want it shared or private. For example, I share lots of Smubs, but I set up my own “Janet/bank” Smub to get to my online bank page, and made that private.

Making a Smub is simple, tag and bookmark at the same time.

Share your Smub. We’ve set it up so it’s easy to share via email, or on your Facebook, MySpace or Twitter accounts directly from your Smub bookmark page or the sharing window that will open each time you create a shareable Smub.

Sharing Smubs is automatic in email, Facebook, MySpace and Twitter.

But one of the coolest thing about Smubs is how you can say them to share them. I can be on the phone with Todd, for example, and can say, “Check out Meryl’s blog post on Smub at “Janet/merylpost” and he has all the information he needs to get there.

The more you use Smub, the more you find uses for it. We’ll talk more about those soon. Tomorrow I’ll introduce you to the optional, but very handy Smub address bar.

Meanwhile, thanks for dropping by. We look forward to hearing your thoughts. We especially welcome your feedback. We’re in beta, so fire away!