One of the issues with using Twitter is dealing with the huge number of useful links that stream through every day. Delicious has always been the way I organise my bookmarks but I want to bookmark so many sites that I could spend all day manually adding them.

Even with the little Delicious bookmarklet the work-flow of saving links from Twitter was so time consuming that I stopped doing it. However recently I have found a solution that automatically saves links from Twitter – this has revitalised my use of Delicious and means I can bookmark whilst using Twitter.

Packrati.us

This little application looks at your own Tweets and saves anything with links as Delicious bookmarks. To set it up it is just a case of linking the two accounts (Delicious+Twitter). A BETA app by Marc Mims I have found this to be a brilliant and simple way to store links. Here are some features that make it so useful:

• The simple work-flow is crucial. When I retweet a link or share one in my own tweets, the URL will be automatically saved in Delicious.
• Packrati.us converts Twitter hashtags to Delicious tags. Essential to help you find the links again later.
• Twitter favourites are bookmarked too.
• Existing bookmarks will be replaced (this is an option in the preferences which gives you lots of ways to fine tune the process).
• You are able to say which sources to exclude from this process, I don’t want my Posterous 365 links to be saved so I have added it as a source to exclude.

Here is how the process looks, first a tweet:

Here is the corresponding tweet automatically saved as a Delicious bookmark,

Packrati.us was easy to setup and it quietly gets on with saving my bookmarks whilst I use Twitter. It has been exactly the sort of little application that I have been looking for to integrate my use of these two great services.

I have also found ReadTwit, from Lionite, useful to snag links from all of the people I follow on Twitter into an RSS reader.

Readtwit filters your twitter feed to links only, resolves link destinations and publishes the content as an RSS feed. You can then use any feed reading software / service to read twitter posted content along with the rest of your feeds.

The feed is pretty busy so I mainly use it for data-mining and searching for interesting resources or if I have something specific in mind. I find it less useful than Packrati.us though because I have less control over what appears there.

With Packrati.us I can choose exactly what I want to save and tag it too, it is Twitter bookmarking. If you are like me there was always links that I thought useful, never saved them and then cursed the fact as I desperately tried to find them later. Perhaps those days are over.

What processes or application do you currently use to save links from Twitter? Can you recommend any other tools that facilitates this process?