Social bookmarking is basically all about pointing out cool websites for your friends (or strangers) to find. If you’ve never heard about it, of have just started thinking about getting into the whole social bookmarking craze … or if you just want to save your bookmarks online so you can get to them from other computers … there’s a bewildering array of possibilities:
It seems to have all started with Del.icio.us, the oldest, most popular, and most populated social bookmarking site. Delicious has an extremely rich API, but their front page is a nothing but a list of the most recently marked URLs, and their “import” feature chokes when faced with my bookmarks file (containing around 3000 bookmarks). There are several sites that basically just clone delicious and try to improve it in subtle ways: Simpy is ok, but the interface is only a slight improvement over delicious, and it couldn’t import my bookmarks file either. Furl is Looksmart’s copy, without anything in particular to recommend it, honestly. Yahoo’s Web2 is … well, Yahoo’s take on the concept. The downside is you can’t really search or browse links posted by people unless they are in your “community,” so it’s really all about building the Yahoo, 360, YIM, GeoCities networks.
The new generation of social bookmarking sites are creating more interactive sites with more community features and more support for comments and other features.
- Shadows is a site by Pluck, a company based on social interactions and bookmarking. Looks very nice, and has a neat feature that lets easily bring up a “shadow page” for any site with user comments … but it’s really rather buggy right now, and after going through the whole process of importing my bookmarks, completely failed to actually import anything.
- Spurl indexes the actual pages as they’re added, so when you do a search on spurl it can search not only the tags for a URL, but the actual contents as well.
- Clipmarks goes one step further, letting you store peices of the page, (images, text clips, etc) as well as just URLs, making it an excellent research tool!
- BlinkList stands out among the rest for its excellent interactive AJAX interface, with “starred” links that stand out from linked pages, user groups, etc. It was the first one to actually succeed in importing all of my bookmarks, and even tagging them reasonably.
There’s a few others here at the end that I just don’t know how to categorize … JetEye is still in its early stages, but it collects images, URLs, and comments … from searches that you dothrough their interface at sites like Google and Flickr. However, it seems focused on that to the exclusion of anything else, so I’m not sure how useful it is, unless you’re willing to switch to that. Digg is news focused. Their front-page shows URLs according to their freshness and popularity (number of “diggs”).
Edit Nov 4, 2005]
Wow. so, there’s lots more of these: NetVouz, BlogMakrs, ChipMark, which is open source, LinkAGoGo, which offers custom-built portal-like pages, built from your bookmarks …
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I view this as a fad so my disinterest in social bookmarking is biased, but I just don’t see the value.
As I understand it, the purpose of social bookmarking is to filter through all the junk on the net by using actual people to rate what they find interesting. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that approach except for extracting meaningful results from it. I took one look at delicious a few different times and just closed the browser window because it’s an ugly, disorganized mess.
Just like social bookmarking, the purpose of google and yahoo and the other search engines is also to filter the junk on the net, but by using robots and scripts instead of people. The pages are ranked by various criteria that mostly boil down to how many people find the pages interesting (via linking).
The big difference between the social bookmarking and the search engines is that the search engines are automated and have better interfaces for searching.
Is there anything social bookmarking provides that search engines don’t besides a trendy way to do the same thing?
Well, honestly, I think all these social bookmarking sites have big impact as a factor in the google recipe (that is: people create links to sites, google’s recipe is based on the number of links to sites …). However, other than that, I don’t really use these sites for searching at this point … more for surfing and discovery. I can add the bookmark lists of people I know (who share one or more of my interests) to my daily rotation, so to speak.
Just taking delicious as an example: I can subscribe to an RSS feed for all the links that you post, or all the links that you post and tag with “programming” or whatever tags I’m interested in. It’s a lot like StumbleUpon, but with more control to me
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