So, next time when you’re on the subway, waiting endlessly for your easyJet flight to announce the gate, or simply enjoying the summer sun in your back yard: you can now call up Mento on your cell phone anytime and anywhere with our mobile-optimized interface at http://m.mento.info/

This version is still in testing and we’d love to get your feedback as always. Right now, you can access:

• Your Mento Mix
• Your Inbox
• Your Network’s Recent Updates (summary)
• and any user’s links, including your own of course

You’ll notice that all outgoing links are re-formatted for mobile viewing. This currently happens by default (for the convenience of the majority of mobile users), but we’ll make this is an optional setting in the near future. Until then, You can also scroll to the bottom of any external page and select “View in HTML” to see the original page.

Happy Subway Surfing!

That said, we’re especially happy to announce a new Mento feature that was first suggested by Sascha, one of our earliest and most loyal users. Visit Sascha on Mento.

Today, we’re adding support for Skitch, the popular and awesome screenshot annotation tool for the Mac made by the folks at Plasq.

Adding screenshots to your Mento links has long been possible with our Firefox extension but since many of our Mac users prefer using Safari, we thought we could do better.

Get Started

1. You’ll need to download Skitch (it’s free) if you don’t have it already
2. Next, activate the Mento + Skitch feature and follow the short instructions to set-up your Mento account in Skitch

How does it work?

1. Take a screenshot with Skitch (even add annotations if you’d like)
2. Webpost it to the Mento account you created in Skitch
3. Open the Mento Box as usual and we’ll add your screenshot to that link

The super-awesome Sascha, who suggested the idea, made a short video to show you what that looks like:

We hope you’ll like this new feature! And remember: your great ideas could soon be part of Mento, too. Share them with us today and please keep the feedback coming!

Thanks Sascha!

First of all, a big thanks goes to Jason Kincaid and Mike Arrington for being the first to give Mento the stage at TechCrunch and allowing so many of you to find out about our young endeavor with the extended review that Jason put together. We’ll soon respond to Jason’s points in another post right here — but today, something else is more important to me:

Most of all, I’d like to thank our new users for joining so enthusiastically this week, for twittering so adamantly about it and for sharing your experience by inviting more friends. An encore round of thanks goes especially to the 58 of you who took time out of your busy and connected lives to send us your feedback. You told us about your first impressions, the problems you encountered and the ideas that we’ll take to heart to improve your future Mento experience! Thanks Boaz (922 links already!), Dietmar (833), Rouven (250), Sascha (231), Sven (164), Pierro (115), Stefan (97), Lindsey (77), Heinrich (62), Lars (51), Sridhar (43), Markus (41), Reiner (35), Ole (33), Ute (32), Bastian (29), Michael (27), Tye (20), Min (20), Achim (19), Doug (18), Mini (18), Alexis (18), Ellen Petry (18), Mike (17), James (17), Chris (15), Nathan (15), Evan (13), Michael (12), Daynah (11), Nasar (11), Jimmy (10), BJ (6), Steve (6), Brian (6), Becky (5), Jesse (4), Jonathon (4), Moritz (3), Richard (3), Larry (2), Charles (2), Guilherme (1), Hiro (1), Oliver, Rowan, Stephen, Todd, Alex, Brady, Alexandar, Lloyd, Stephane, Brian, Attila, Lindsay and Kevin. You rock! And if you got in touch and haven’t heard from us just yet, hang tight - we’ll surely get back to you in the next day!

For your convenience, we want to keep these blog posts short and snappy in the future. That said: Until next time!

Today, I’d like to present you with Mento and invite you to play with it! Use it to share links with friends, family and co-workers — in a way that’s more fun, less overwhelming and makes it easier to stay in touch.

Why Mento? We all send and receive emails about great videos and interesting links. But because email is being used for everything from travel confirmations to birthday greetings, it’s a big bag of everything and not a good filter. Only the very most important links get sent by email and everything else stays in our browsers, unshared and lonely. You might surely use services like del.icio.us, which are handy for saving links, but they’re not made for sending links to someone, let alone adding a personal message or continuing the conversation.

Sharing links should work better: it should be smarter than receiving too many emails, more personal and focused on the people who matter to you, take far less effort and connect to everything else you already use to stay in touch. Those are the goals of Mento and we now made our first step towards them with the public release of its first version:

Mento is leaving its private beta this week and opening its doors after months of development and improvements. New toys are indeed exciting!

Sign-ups are by invitation-only because that creates the most meaningful networks — that means you can be invited by a friend or sign up to a receive a personal invitation from the Mento team. Check our Facebook page to connect with friends who are already using Mento or request an invitation on Mento’s homepage.

We’ll be listening closely to your feedback and improving the service so that it comes closer to what you expect from it — and continues to feel as exciting as it did on your first day.

Have fun!
Greg
– find me at mento.info/grex

Where to go from here:

• Request an Invitation or Find friends who are already using Mento (via Facebook)
• Check out the links that our awesome and earliest users are sharing: Boaz, Dietmar, Sascha, Ute, Lars, Artis, Ole, Bastian, Michael, … we’ll be featuring them and many others regularly over the coming weeks right here.