Mister Wong launches English version of social-bookmarking service

The first question that pops into my head when checking out new social-bookmarking services is, How does it stack up to Del.icio.us? It's one of the most popular social-bookmarking services, and also one of the oldest. Mister Wong is the new kid on the block. It's a social bookmarking service that's been around in Europe since early 2006 and claims to be the second-most-popular bookmarking service worldwide. It launched the English version this morning, and I think it's good enough to make a mark in the bookmarking crowd.

Like other bookmarking services, Mister Wong lets you save links for yourself and to share them with others. This can be managed on the site, or by installing a toolbar for your browser. The toolbar gives you three options: one to bookmark, one to share, and a quick link back to the Mister Wong front door. Once installed, the toolbar has a few benefits. For one, you'll be able to add links while browsing and without having to navigate back to the site. The other is to choose which version of Mister Wong you want to share the link to, as there are localized versions in six different countries. I don't think I'd ever use this feature, but it's nice that it's there. For those who don't feel like installing anything in their browsers, there's a bookmarklet too.

Mister Wong takes a slightly different approach than Del.icio.us when it comes to sharing links with others. While Del.icio.us has a vague notion of groups with its browse-by-tags feature, Mister Wong's variation is much more concrete. There is the idea of the collective, but there is also a set of smaller, user-created factions called groups. Groups are a communal hodgepodge of links that can be added by anyone who is a member. The service then borrows a little from Reddit with a voting system that lets you do a virtual thumbs-up or thumbs-down to decide which links should rise to the top. There's also a buddy system to make friends, and user profiles that show off your latest stream of links and bookmarks.

As far as integration goes, Mister Wong has a variety of tools set up to let you share your links with others, or add "Wong it" buttons to your blog or Web site. There are also embeddable badges and widgets for Netvibes, Pageflakes, OS X Dashboard, and Vista's Sidebar.

Ultimately, the use for services like these come down to finding new and interesting links. For that, Mister Wong does a good job, and will do better with a larger group of users who put in the time and effort to add and rate new bookmarks.

Mister Wong is a little reminiscent of Del.icio.us, with a hot list and tag cloud for new bookmarks.

(Credit: CNET Networks)