Bookmarking: The red-haired stepchild of social media

I don't get it.

We have all manner of Web 2.0 properties to cater to just about every sort of online need. I'm not going to name any specific site--any such would be either completely obscure or wildly controversial--but you know what I mean.

However, bookmarking seems to have remained a backwater. There are apparently a lot of sites that are connected with bookmarking in some way. (See, for example, the bookmarking category on this list.) However, the best one can say is that no newcomer has gained any real traction and the sort-of-known--at least within the geek crowd--have done remarkably little over the past few years. In fact, I'm struck that essentially nothing has changed since this 2004 James Governor post. 3+ years is an eternity in Web 2.0.

A del.icio.us 2.0 is in preview; perhaps that will make this discussion moot. The oddly-named del.icio.us certainly appears to be the best-known and have the most critical mass of the social book mark sites. It's just that it hasn't changed in ages. (It's a Yahoo property, story sound familiar?)

From my perspective, the social aspect of these sites is almost secondary. Yes, there are a few friends whose bookmarks I keep an eye on. And, when tagging, seeing what the "crowd" has used as tagging terms can help you stay consistent. But I don't view the storage of bookmarks as primarily a social or sharing activity.

I mostly use del.icio.us to store bookmarks for my own use and to generate blog posts such as this one. Today, that means dealing with homemade scripts and a strictly limited number of characters in the comments or notes about a link. Nor does del.icio.us provide any real organizational tools to easily consolidate or change tags.

In short, bookmarking is such an obvious "cloud" application; a bookmark isn't much use without an Internet connection. (Permanently saving the content of pages is another topic that I view as largely independent of this one.) Yet it's an application space that has been poorly served by "Web 2.0" to date.

[Fifth-Grade-Forester]

I agree that social bookmarking has not evolved toward its stated potential. It is a great way for me to organize my bookmarks and save them for easy access. However, there is a much more valuable use for me. Each of my fifth grade students has a delicious account. We also have a class account which each student is linked to in their network. In this class account we can find bookmarks related to our studies, as well as others that I post for different uses. When presenting a new lesson, I can tell my class where to find a particular bookmark for a site that they will need and use for a project. This may not be entirely social, but it is certainly educational.

[simotamo]

Gordon:
I'm a Simpy fan and have recently read their blog post about 10 reasons why Simpy is better than del.icio.us. Del.icio.us is amazingly inert! The original founder is nowhere to be found, it seems. Not much creativity going on. You mention tag consolidation and changing. This is something I regularly use. Simpy has the ability to remove, rename, merge, and split tags, and I regularly use rename function to consolidate my tags (e.g. if I spot tags "blog" and "blogs" I'll rename one to the other and thus avoid tag noise).

Fifth-Grade-Forester - ah, shared class account. Yuck. No privacy either, I imagine. This is what Groups are for. Oh, but del.icio.us doesn't have that. OK, let me find that "10 reasons...." blog post I mentioned above....google.... here: http://blog.simpy.com/blojsom/blog/2008/01/18/10-Reasons-for-Simpy-vs-del-icio-us.html
Consider a switch. I switched a while ago and never looked back. Yes, you can import your del.icio.us links...

[ghaff]

Thanks. I will take a look. Frankly I'm less interested in the social aspect anyway (in part because I publish my current links as a blog post) so my primary concern is whether it works for me.

[brianna102]

Hello this is Brianna visiting first time to this site and find it very interesting. I really like to join it.and really want to continue the discussion with this site..

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Brianna

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