Jeteye: a surprisingly useful bookmark sharing site

I got a somewhat murky pitch from Jeteye CEO David Hayden last week. He was telling me about his new collaborative publishing tool, how important it is to integrate search and collaboration, and how critical it is to store not just links, but images and pages. He said Jeteye is "better than bookmarks, and it's for sharing." I didn't get it.

But this weekend I had a chore to do: I needed to send a bunch of pictures and links to a contractor doing work on our house. There was no easy and fast way to do this with the tools I was familiar with (and that wouldn't confuse the contractor). But with my conversation with Hayden fresh in mind, I fired up Jeteye, and found that it did exactly what I needed. David: Now I get it.

There are plenty of other tools that let you collect and store bookmarks online. But this one makes extremely short work of creating very clean and clear pages of images and where they came from, and it makes it easy to share these pages, which it calls "Jetpacks." (To put content into your own Jetpack, you use a Firefox plug-in. People you want to share it with don't need the plug-in unless you want to make them collaborators on the page.)

Jeteye competes with Squidoo, which appears to be more focused on creating collections for wide public distribution, and Plum, which isn't yet in public beta. It's also in the mix with Google Notebook (which doesn't have a good sharing function) and BackPack (which is not free if you want to share images). There are, in fact, dozens of sites that offer some sort of link sharing. But this weekend, all I needed was a quick way to share images and links with somebody else, and Jeteye was the best tool I knew of that did it.

For an alternate view, see "Why use Jeteye?" on Mashable.