Here’s what my toolbar looks like in Safari on my Mac (looks about the same in Chrome on my Dell).

What’s happened is that these are all what are known as bookmarklets. Rather than just bookmarks with URLs that take you somewhere (some page you like to visit a lot); these little babies have javascript in them and actually do something to the page you are on. Say that I’m on the New York Times looking at some article about a new discovery about the brain. I got it because someone else emailed it to me. Well, the first thing is that this really might not be a good time to read the article, so clicking “Save for later” is a bookmarklet that adds the page to my queue of articles over on laterloop. Laterloop will keep track of your reading queue, let you check items off as you read them, and it will do so in your feedreader of choice or on your iPhone. Get those (possibly important) articles out of your inbox and into your reading queue and then when you really do have some down time, read the queue. Very handy.

However, you might also want to pass this particular article along to some folks who you know also might want to see it. Personally, I’m a firm believer in thoroughly reading what I forward. The value of the network depends on how much we fact check and filter. But sometimes the source is enough and that’s what the Sharethis bookmarklet will do for you. It generates an inline dialogue box that lets you share the article with friends in innumerable ways (email, delicious, friendfeed, facebook, ust to name a small few).

The list of handy bookmarklets goes on. “Post to Delicious” will let you track your bookmarks online at delicious.com so you can get to them from any platform or machine. Todoist is a fantastic to-do tracker that I’ve raved about before—their delegate bookmarklet will let you turn pages and online email items into to-to items in your lists. And is.gd will take horrendously long URLs (like mine) and make them bite-size for posting to something like Twitter or just making your emails easier on the eyes.

What’s strange is that these two sites have chosen very different methodologies for gathering all your friends into one place. Friendfeed.com, on the one hand, let’s you create a feed into which you import your accounts. I mess around on Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, Del.icio.us, and I have two blogs ¹. So I pulled them all into one feed and voilá!—with merely one pretentious French word, I have my own personal feed. Nice.

Socialthing, on the other hand, let’s you put in all your account information for various sites and then updates your “lifestream” with all the activities and buzz of your friends on that site. Socialthing is still in beta right now, but if you’re really interested in getting me an account, ask nicely and I’ll give you one of my invitations.

The truth is, I like both sites. Friendfeed.com wins hand-down for being plugged into the most services. But I think Socialthing is right on their tale. Not that it matters. Really, Socialthing is for the online wallflowers and Friendfeed is for the attention junkies. Think of one as email and the other as broadcast. You can create a friendfeed and give it to anyone. That’s a nice thing for us social butterflies. Socialthing on the other hand is a little less loud. You have to log in to the site, and you don’t have to wait on your friends to figure out what “feeds” are before you can subscribe to their goings-on. I think for me, for the time being, both will serve a valuable service. And like a lot of social sites, it depends a lot on where your friends are on the I-have-my-own-blog-I-just-found-out-about-myspace scale.