Ok, I don’t know about anyone else but I’m dealing with a serious bookmarklet explosion. Web 2.0 is full of bookmarklets! These links you drag up to your toolbar can do amazing things, but there’s only so much room on the toolbar.

Enter Blummy. The concept is simple and brilliant. You create an account (free, I think just a user name and password if I remember correctly) and then with relative ease you can create a Super Bookmarklet. You can drag and drop from a menu of the most interesting bookmarklets other people have contributed, into a box that you size yourself. Then, you drag your Blummy bookmarklet link to your toolbar.

Ok, get ready for this: when you are bopping around the web and find a site that you want to know more about or do something with – you just click your Blummy bookmarklet and all of the sudden your personal bookmarklet box drops down with all of the bookmarklets you put into it inside. This is way cool; given the explosion of awesome services usable by one-click javascript bookmarklet the browser is going to have to change. To be honest I wouldn’t be surprised if Firefox started doing something just like this soon, and then 3 years later Microsoft’s Internet Explorer will begin doing it too. But for now, I think you’ll love Blummy.

Just to give you an idea of the possibilities, here’s what I’ve got in my Blummy Box:

• Bookmark to Del.icio.us
• Add to Newsgator (subscribe to the RSS feed of the page you are on)
• Furl+Del.icio.us (save in both Furl and Delicious – something I would love to do but have never been able to make work for me on any computer anywhere. Now being no exception. It doesn’t work!)
• Furl This!
• Check Uptime – evaluates how often a website is unavailable. I great idea, but there isn’t enough data out there yet. Or something, I have not found a single web site it finds data for yet (including msn.com) so I’m going to remove this one. I’ll just drag and drop it out of my box)
• WayBack – awesome service of the Internet Archive that shows you what the website you are on used to look like last time their spiders indexed it. Invaluable. Great for “fixing” other peoples’ broken links, or finding things taken offline for a variety of reasons.
• Google Who’s Linking – very nice. Search in Google to see who has linked to the site you are on. Great for discovering related content and organizations.
• Whois – this is how you find out who owns the site you are looking at, and a variety of other information about it. I use this a couple times a week.
• Wikipedia look-up. Great idea, looks up anything you have highlighted in your browser in Wikipedia. The version I drug and dropped doesn’t work, at least in Safari browser.
• Gmail send, nice. Click this puppy and a pop-up window appears from your gmail account with the URL of the site you are on in the body of the email ready to send to some one. The title of the page is the subject line, and my email signature is there! This beats Furl’s email function.
• Del.icio.us look-up. One of my favorites. I use it daily. Pops up a window with all the tags, descriptions and the users who have applied them to the site you are on in the social bookmarking site Del.icio.us. Reminds you that the description field is important to fill out!! I can’t just talk about that bookmarklet without giving it to you right here: Del.lookup – try it out, you’ll love it.
• Google What’s Similar, another search function I use often when doing promotion or outreach online. Nice that it’s available in one (or two) clicks.
• View Scripts – nice idea, should show me any “scripts” being run on the site I’m looking at. Doesn’t work for me.

So that’s what I’ve got in my Blummy box so far! It’s also not too hard to create your own bookmarklets. I just grabbed the above from user contributed ones, many of which I had seen before.

The downside: It’s ugly. I don’t know why we aren’t allowed to tell blummy how many cells we’d like to populate and drag+drop bookmarklets into those cells, rather than the sloppy free-form space it now offers. It looks less professional than it could. But really, the functionality is so rad that I’m not losing sleep.

Technorati Tags: blummy, bookmarklets, AJAX, Web2.0, wonderfulness, FireFox, IE