Shifd

Shifd is a nice little program that just might prove handy for some folks. Created by two guys from the New York Times R&D department in a 22-hour hack at a London contest, the app lets you file snippets of data that interest you and retrieve them from any computer or your cell phone. (The feature involving mobile phones is currently only for the U.S. but they’re working on Canada, we’re told.) There’s also a desktop version running on Adobe Air that syncs your notes with the Times server.

You’re invited to file data in one of three modes: notes, places or links. The links are active, of course, and can be booted up from your brower via a toolbar plugin (i.e. bookmarklet); and in what is perhaps the app’s best feature, the places automatically call up Google or Yahoo maps to show the location. Data can be archived, so it doesn’t clutter up your “home” interface, which, is atttractively clean; and the archives can be searched and pruned.

This may not do much of anything for the BlackBerry crowd, but it’s the sort of simple tool that could appeal to the rest of us.