Delicious, the social-bookmarking service owned by Yahoo, has unveiled home page changes that are intended to do a better job of showcasing links that are currently popular. Although Delicious isn't sharing the exact details of its algorithm, it apparently includes using the number of Twitter messages related to a given item.
Writing on the Delicious blog, Vik Singh, an architect at Yahoo, writes that "For this new Fresh homepage, our system displays recently bookmarked links and tweeted messages focused mostly on technology, web, politics, and media. Underneath the hood, Fresh factors several features into the ranking like related bookmark and tweet counts, "eats our own dogfood" by leveraging BOSS to filter for high quality results, as well as stitches tweets to related articles even if the tweets do not provide matching URLs."
The issue that Delicious is trying to address here is that the existing "Popular Bookmarks" tab (which will continue to be available) tends to point to what Singh describes as "authoritative resources rather than fresh news." This is because, although Delicious is often described as a social-bookmarking service, in fact, many use it primarily as a way to store bookmarks online solely for their own purposes. And, in fact, Delicious even introduced private tags in 2007 that made it possible to save bookmarks without sharing.
Not everyone is happy about the change. Delicious founder Joshua Schacter, who left Yahoo last year (and is now at Google) writes on Twitter that "I can't BELIEVE delicious did integration with other social networks before finishing with its own." He adds that "i had always wanted delicious to show notes from your social network on the links that you bookmark."
Social bookmarking has often seemed like rather the red-haired stepchild of social media. Its evolution in general has been slow and there's long been a tension between bookmarking to share and bookmarking to store.
In general, social bookmarking services have also failed to surface the data that they have stored in ways that allow for useful and serendipitous exploration. This latest announcement tries to do something about that by making use of data from Twitter, a service that's all about the now.
Don't get me started on weird period-ized names.
As I've written about previously, social bookmarking hasn't advanced a whole lot. Frankly, I don't care a whole lot about the social aspect beyond maybe keeping an eye on the links of a few friends who I know turn up interesting stuff. However, I've found that keeping my bookmarks in the Cloud rather than in my browser works well for me. Doing a daily link post with some short commentary also fits my style and workflow better than doing a lot of short posts does.
My latest experiment is with Ma.gnolia.com. It's pretty, but probably its biggest advantage in my book is that it doesn't truncate the description (i.e. the comment or excerpt that I enter) like del.icio.us does. Although del.icio.us's limited character count does encourage a certain twitter-ish brevity, which is probably good discipline for me, I do find it annoying. You also don't get to see what is actually being truncated until you save it.
Ma.gnolia.com has its own application programming interface (API) to interact with the service. However, it also supports an API and other access methods that mirror those in de.licio.us. Thus, with minor (but hard to figure out from the documentation) modifications, I was able to use the same javascript that I use to generate my daily link post from del.icio.us with Ma.gnolia.
The one big downside that I've run into so far is that, although Ma.gnolia claims to import from del.icio.us, it's not clear the import works--at least for large bookmark collections. I fired off the import two days ago and, while it claims to be in process, it hasn't completed yet. I probably won't use the service if I can't, in practice, move my bookmarks over.
(Programming hint. If you've used the JSON approach with del.icio.us to read your bookmarks, the equivalent magic incantation with Ma.gnolia should contain http://ma.gnolia.com/json/mirrord/people/USERNAME )
For all the company's overall success, some of its individual entrants sometimes seem not just lagging and wanting, but sometimes just plain... off.
I'm not so much talking here about sites like Orkut and Google Video that were more-or-less representative of and competitive with social media and video sharing sites (respectively) at the time they came on the scene. They simply didn't rise to the top of the pile for complicated and somewhat elusive reasons that would make for another long discussion.
However, other examples from Google just seem oddly out of tune.
Take Google Browser Sync for example. Social bookmarking may be the red-headed stepchild of social media, as I've written about previously. But that's an opportunity for Google. So what do they do? They come up with some relatively lame mechanism to share bookmarks among multiple computers. I might have found this useful five years ago. However, for many people (especially those who worry about coordinating multiple computers), bookmarks have become something to be stored in the network rather than locally. At least if you aren't storing the content as well as the URL, it's not like they're much use if you're disconnected from the network cloud anyway.
And then there's the peculiar case of Picasa. At the end of the day, Picasa is much more about a simple image cataloging and editing program for the PC than it is a vibrant online photo site. Strip away the client component and it feels awfully first generation--a place to store some snapshots for a few friends and family than a place to participate in an online community. Think Snapfish, not Flickr. Nor does it have any of the more sophisticated tools that sites like SmugMug and PhotoShelter offer to better cater to more serious amateurs and pros.
Indeed, if one were to look at these two examples in isolation, one might be inclined to think that Google doesn't even get social media, Web 2.0, all that good stuff. After all, the counterexamples like the Google Earth community are rather sparse.
But it's worse that that. It can be useful to have a client-side application--that's the reality and, in any case, Picasa has one for reasons of history as much as strategy. But Picasa so often feels like its design center is that offline component rather than the online one. Does Google even have a truly coherent vision of computing in the Cloud?
Google has a decidedly mixed record with its acquisitions (including Picasa). But it's too bad that it's probably not practical at this point just to snap up the Flickr photo site and del.icio.us social bookmarking. Their owner, Yahoo, has certainly never known what to do with them. But Yahoo is a competitor and the tumult around Microsoft's attempted acquisition likely makes any such move impossible. Too bad.
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.
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