Shelfster: A Competitor to Evernote

On April 28, 2010 I received an email from Noemi Szoke, the Marketing Manager of a new service called Shelfster.
Here is a copy of the original email (with the link blanked out).

Hello Annienygma,

After reading your article "The beauty of Evernote" I have noticed your interest in the subject of collecting information in one place. We are looking for people with experience and involvement in these kind of applications, and we hope that you could take a look at our private beta application Shelfster. Think about sharing and discovering information in a different way.

You can find below the link for your private-beta invitation which you can share with as many as 10 of your readers:

*******************link was here**************************

We want to grow, learn, build and improve with your help, we appreciate all kinds of feedback, be it good or bad, we can take it :)

Looking forward to hear from you,
Noemi Szoke
Marketing Manager

I emailed Ms. Szoke back and gladly accepted the opportunity to beta-test this application.

I went to the link, signed up (the sign-up process is quick and painless) before downloading the desktop tool. The first day I clipped and saved and experimented.

The second day I was unable to persuade the desktop tool to load. I attempted a repair install which had no effect other than to cause the program to run in the background but I could not call up the clipper tool.

I didn't fool with it for a day or so because of work but after uninstalling and reinstalling the program it is working wonderfully well.

I am running Windows 7 (64-bit) which tends to be a bit flaky when running 32-bit applications. As a result I cannot directly blame the glitch on Shelfster.

This program not only enables you to clip and save things online (a boon to those who use multiple computers or are worried about losing their data) but also allows you to share your clips with your friends (and the whole world at that).

With every entry you instruct Shelfster whether you want the clip to be private or public. On the Shelfster website you can actually browse other's public offerings, which is kinda neat!

Like Evernote this application will have both a free and a pro version with the main differences being how much you can upload. I'm not sure if this application will have OCR (optical character recognition) of the jpeg images like Evernote has, but I've just gotten started trying this out!

I have promised to give an honest evaluation of this service and post an honest review online. I have also agreed to share the opportunity to beta-test this with at least 10 other people, though Ms. Szoke has generously offered more invitations should the need arise.

So far I have given two others links to the invitation and would love to at least find eight more interested in giving this application a shot. If you are interested send me a message with "Shelfster" as the subject line and I'll send you a link. First come, first served: there are only so many invitations I am allowed to issue so please do not message me unless you are serious about trying this new application.

The developers are currently working on an iPhone and Mac version and will let us know as soon as they are available but if you have a PC you can at least go to the website and check it out! They have a video on the home page to explain how it works. Love it or hate it please send me your comments. This will benefit the developers in creating the application, us in using the application and others who wish to explore the application.

Disclaimer: I am not receiving any compensation for testing Shelfster other than the pleasure of trying out something new (and of course sharing this with others). During the next few days and weeks I will be giving this service a thorough test and posting my findings here.