Many people access information from multiple devices these days, a trend ShifD believes merits a need for a hosted service to track notes, links, and places of interest.
ShifD (pronounced “shift”) broke out of Yahoo’s Hack Day London last year as the best overall hack. Creators Nick Bilton and Michael Young, developers with the New York Times, built ShifD to do a straightforward task well: make notes available to people on their myriad computers, cellphones, etc.
They told Murdok in a phone chat that ShifD addressed a simple concept people have requested. In our experience, simplicity can prove powerful. Witness sites like Digg, Flickr, Delicious, and Twitter as examples.
The early release version of ShifD from the duo served in gathering data about usage of the service. They worked on making an interface that could be consistently delivered across devices, and also came up with special version of ShifD for the iPhone and the Blackberry along the way.
Users can access ShifD from web browsers on their computers or their phones. We found it worked fine on the Opera Mini and NetFront mobile browsers. ShifD also offers an Adobe Air application for the desktop, and a toolbar plug-in for quickly saving URLs to a ShifD account.
Once logged into ShifD, the user can create and save notes, links, or places from a single text field. ShifD tries to recognize what type of content is being entered so it can recommend whether to save it as a place (if there is an address) or a link (when entering a URL). Someone can always choose to save something as a note, place, or link.
After entering the content into ShifD from one device, it becomes available when accessed from other gadgets. We found ourselves thinking of it as a super-simple wiki style service in this regard.
Most importantly, ShifD works as billed, and makes place-shifting of content an easy task. As a bonus, places saved in ShifD generate a map (Google or Yahoo for choice) associated with them, something we think makes the place option even more useful.
We aren’t going to leave our beloved Rhodia pads and G-2 Gel pens in a time capsule just yet. But for the connected person, using ShifD makes a lot of sense.
