Tempmarks

Somewhere in my browser there's a folder called read later. It has years of links in it. I couldn't tell you what's inside, because I never open it; I only add to it. Every bookmark in there felt important for about a day, and then it became sediment.

That's the flaw in every bookmark manager ever built: they all assume a saved link is worth keeping forever. It isn't. Information has a half-life. If a link matters, you'll come back for it this week. If you don't, it was never important, and now it's clutter with a favicon.

So for January's project I built Tempmarks, a bookmark manager where links expire by default.

How it works

Every saved link lives for seven days. It stays visible and one click away the whole time, and if you haven't done anything with it by the end of the week, it quietly disappears. No cleanup sessions, no guilt, no archive growing in the dark. You can save full links or short notes, and if something earns its keep, you promote it to permanent storage with one click.

That's the entire model. Temporary by default, permanent only if earned.

Seven days turned out to be the right constraint. It's long enough to actually get to the thing and short enough that you can't hoard. Instead of "should I keep this forever?", the only question a bookmark ever asks you is "is this worth my attention this week?" That's a much easier question, and most links fail it.

Where it fits

I don't use Tempmarks instead of Notion or Obsidian. I use it in front of them. It's the inbox where links prove themselves before they're allowed anywhere near long-term storage: whatever survives a week of scrutiny gets promoted and filed properly, and everything else expires without me ever making a decision about it.

If you spend your days saving documentation, threads, and RFCs you swear you'll get back to, that filter does a surprising amount of work.

The boring details

No ads, no selling personal data, minimal anonymized analytics, and a generous free tier. The web app works on desktop and mobile, the Chrome extension has shipped, Firefox is close behind, and native mobile apps are in the works.

Try it

Tempmarks is live at tempmarks.com. Even if it doesn't stick, a week of watching your bookmarks quietly expire will change how you think about saving things. Most of them were never coming back anyway.

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