What is it?

ShifD calls itself “a mobile application that provides users the capability to seamlessly shift content back and forth between their desktop computers and mobile devices.” In English, it’s a way to store snippets, links and maps on either your desktop/laptop or your mobile and access them from any of them. Useful if you’re reading a paper at lunch and want to remind yourself to check something out, or on your way to an appointment and need a map on your cellphone to guide you.

My ten minutes’ worth:

Signing up is painless and doesn’t require lots of personal information.

You can add stuff via the web page (above), via a toolbar plugin (actually a bookmarklet; no need to add extra information, so it’s pretty quick) or via a standalone application, built within Adobe’s AIR platform:

Add text or drag it (or a link) into the box at the top, select one of the three buckets (Notes, Places or Links) and automatically one of the three sections below will be updated, depending on what you’ve dragged there.

This creates an archive of interesting stuff, easily accessible by web or widget. Then there’s your mobile.

The mobile side is where this might be most useful, and in a sense the point of the whole thing, but right now it’s not really got much to say for itself. At some point you should be able to send an SMS to yourself of something you like, which would be simple.

For now, however, there are a couple of things you can do. You can view the notes you’ve sent to yourself. And you can, or should be able to, view the map links you send to youself as maps in your mobile phone browser. This, I have to say, would be very useful, but it’s not working for me yet. Then there’s using your cellphone to input stuff–I often find myself wanting to make notes which can then appear somewhere, and most times I use email for that. ShifD in theory offers a better way of doing this, but I hate doing stuff in a mobile browser: Adding a note here requires you to sign in, and navigate to the page to add a note:

Adding the note is straightforward enough:

Which will then turn up on your page of notes you can view in any browser (although you’ll need to refresh the page to make that happen; it won’t update automatically, apparently):

I also couldn’t get links or notes I added via the desktop application to show up in my mobile browser, for some reason.

Verdict:

It’s nicely designed, and really aims to try to file a hole in the way we collect and access loose data. Once the mobile side works, and the numerous bugs are ironed out, I think it could be quite a useful tool. There’s always a problem with these kinds of things, tho. How sticky are they? It’s got to be a compellingly simple and powerful tool for anyone other than real geeks to get involved in, and I’m not sure the ShifD folks quite have it.

Footnote:

Perhaps the most interesting thing about ShifD is that it’s developed by two guys from within The New York Times’ R&D Lab, so you can’t help wondering where something like this might fit into the world of newspapers.

I’d love to see, for example, a five-digit code at the end of each news story in my newspaper/magazine that I could key into my phone and which would then store a copy of that story on my desktop. Would save me carryinga magic marker around and then forgetting to clip it when I got home. Forget reading the NYT on my handheld: That ain’t going to happen to an old fogey like me; but I’d love a way to store what I liked somewhere useful so that I wouldn’t forget it.

Thanks to:

New York Times Launching Its Mobile-To-PC Content Sharing Service

NY Times launches ShifD