Webware

I'm as guilty as the next person for having a social network portfolio that's too big. Aside from my Twitter account, I belong to Plurk and Identi.ca, and although I use Facebook most often, I still have MySpace and Hi5 accounts.

But now that 2008 has passed and it's time for us to evaluate what we did last year and try to improve upon that for 2009, why don't we start by cleaning out our social network portfolio and start using only those services that we like best in each category? After all, spending more time on multiple services isn't nearly as rewarding as getting more quality time with the best services, right?

Social bookmarking keeper: Delicious

Social bookmarking services are extremely handy when you want to remember a site at a later time, but that doesn't mean they're all created equal. In fact, Delicious, the leader in the space, easily sets itself apart from competitors like Ma.gnolia, Diigo, and ZigTag by boasting a better interface, more users, and better tagging, which makes it easier to find and share bookmarks.

Although Diigo's highlighting options are useful, ZigTag's semantic technology tries to improve bookmarking, and Ma.gnolia aims at providing a more thorough solution, none compare to Delicious. Yahoo's social-bookmarking service now features a streamlined search function, which makes finding bookmarks simple, and its new design makes it the most intuitive social-bookmarking service on the Web. But Delicious' most useful offering--its Firefox add-on--has nothing to do with the site at all. By installing the Delicious add-on, users can tag pages on-the-fly without being forced to visit the Delicious homepage. Granted, its competitors have Firefox add-ons as well, but after using each, it quickly becomes clear that they simply don't work as well as the Delicious tool.

Taking all that into account, I simply don't know why it's worth using another service besides Delicious. It's a superior tool with more convenient options, offering the same basic functionality as its competitors. It's the cream of the social-bookmarking crop.

Micro-blogging keeper: Twitter

I'll be the first to admit that I complain about Twitter as much as the next person, but after using competing services like Identi.ca, Jaiku, and Plurk, it's not hard to figure out that it's the only worthwhile micro-blogging tool.

Granted, Twitter still doesn't offer groups and I wish it had an element of open source like Identi.ca, but the sheer number of users who comment each day on Twitter makes it the best choice for your social-networking portfolio. If you want to be a part of a community that's both lively and engaging, you won't find it anywhere else but on Twitter. And now that it's more reliable and the Fail Whale is an occasional annoyance instead of a daily occurrence, Twitter has become an even more compelling service.

As the best place to find friends, colleagues, and thought-leaders in any industry, Twitter is the obvious choice as the only micro-blogging service that should be found in your social network portfolio.

News Aggregation keeper: Reddit

Trying to find the ideal news aggregator on the Web can be difficult. Depending on your definition, there's conceivably hundreds of services that package the best stories into one page. But it's the "social" news aggregation services, like Digg, Reddit, and StumbleUpon that lead the pack. And although Digg is the most popular service in that grouping, I'm a firm believer that Reddit deserves to stay in your portfolio as your chosen news aggregation service.

Normally, I would pick the social site that offers the largest and most engaged community. But when it comes to news aggregation sites, Digg simply doesn't cut it. Sure, it's the biggest and arguably the most important to content sites, but that alone doesn't make it the best. Instead, I find Reddit's site design, while simple and ugly to some, incredibly useful and designed to help users find the best stories as quickly as possible without gaudy extras. But the most important differentiating factor working to Reddit's advantage is its community. It might be smaller than Digg's, but generally, the comments on each story are more edifying and lack the invective that has become a staple for Kevin Rose's brainchild.

Reddit may not be the biggest, its site design may be odd, and its community not as rabid, but in terms of providing interesting stories on a slew of topics without as much "gaming," it leads the pack and deserves to be in your social network portfolio.

Social Network keeper: Facebook

Choosing the single social network to use while ditching the rest isn't easy, since most of us have friends scattered across Friendster, Hi5, and MySpace. But it's because of those few friends still clinging to the past that we hold on to all those social networks. Enough is enough. It's time to rebuff the rest and stick to Facebook.

Why choose Facebook when MySpace is still the world's most popular social network? It's simple: Facebook doesn't have the awful design found on MySpace profile pages, offers a huge, engaged community, and most importantly, it's growing at a rapid rate, which means all those friends who still hang out at Friendster, LiveJournal, or even MySpace are starting to make their way to Facebook.

MySpace still provides value and Hi5 could be a significant competitor in just a few short years, but for now, Facebook, with its addicting features, applications, and growing community, should find its way to your portfolio as you leave the others out.

Video site keeper: YouTube

Maybe YouTube is the safe choice for the only social video site you should keep in your network portfolio, but I simply don't see how anyone can choose anything else. Vimeo is nice, but much of its content is barely watchable and while Metacafe is still an interesting site worth visiting, it doesn't provide the professional content that YouTube does.

And it's that professional content that I find most valuable when it comes to YouTube. Sometimes, I want to find a music video that isn't available elsewhere and YouTube will have it. And when I'm feeling nostalgic and I want to watch an old clip from The Wonder Years, it's sitting on YouTube waiting for me. As a bonus, some of the user-generated content is pretty good too, though most of it is strange.

I know that anyone can make a case for why practically any user-generated video site on the Web should be the exclusive service in your portfolio, but when it comes to finding the obscure, professional, or just plain weird, YouTube is the only place to go. All the others are practically useless.

I was impressed by the preview I got in September of the bookmarking and Web annotation tool Diigo 3.0. It's taken the company until this morning to release this version to the public. In the interim the team has added features and tweaked the design. It's been worth the wait. This is a powerful and deep tool for serious Web users.

As before, the service has a plug-in (I tried it in Flock) that lets you clip and save text from Web pages, or just page URLs themselves. You can categorize and tag your findings for later, and keep your stuff private, shared with friends, or make it public. It's also very easy to annotate pages and send your mark ups to other users. Diigo is not the only product that does these things (see ClipMarks; BlogRovr), but this version's implementation is especially strong, which is not something I said about previous releases.

Diigo's sidebar plug-in is surprisingly useful.

There's also a very nice new browser sidebar that shows you a lot of useful and focused information, including your own latest bookmarks, those from your Diigo friends, and most cleverly, the Diigo users who have also saved information from the page you're visiting as well as the site itself.

The service finds people who bookmark like you do.

Diigo takes all the data it collects from users and lets them rotate it in interesting ways. When you're looking at the page for a site, for example, you can easily see what other users who bookmarked that site also bookmarked (sort of like MyBlogLog, Medium, eSnips). The system will suggest other sites, based on the tag cloud for a site as well as the affinity you have with its other bookmarkers, that it thinks you might like (see also: Twine). There's also a social angle: The system suggests people that it thinks you'll find interesting, by identifying the ones closest to you in bookmarking behavior.

I recommend Diigo, especially with the plug-in. It's a complex tool but if you take a few minutes to learn what it can do and how it does it, it can make you a more productive, smarter Web user.

Diigo (previous coverage) makes a rich and complex online tool kit. It's a product that's easily dismissed as yet another social-bookmarking tool, yet another Web "clip" saver, or yet another Web page annotator. It is all those things, which makes for a tough pitch. But it's a powerful tool that several people I know swear by.

Diigo lets your community annotate Web pages.

(Credit: Diigo)

At the DemoFall 2007 conference tomorrow, the company will be showing off the 3.0 version (which should go into public beta in a few weeks) that CEO Wade Ren previewed for me recently. It pushes on the social angle: it creates a "content-centric social network," in which people are connected by what they clip, tag, and highlight. Users will be able to find their "neighbors," based not on who is a friend to whom, but rather by who is interested in what. It's actually somewhat similar to Digg's new social network, although Diigo has a much smaller and more serious user community, and a more robust tool set for its users.

I've said before that Diigo's rich tools will reward commitment, quite unlike many current Web 2.0 products that give you instant gratification but don't have much depth. Diigo's new social features add to the product's strength, but they don't make it any easier to get into. I'm looking forward to the demo of this product to see if the audience truly gets what they are looking at.

A Facebook version of Diigo is coming soon, too. That should be very interesting.

See also: Del.icio.us, Clipmarks, ActiveWeave, Jeteye.

The bookmarking and reference service I use most is adding a show-and-tell slideshow feature. Diigo lets you mark up Web pages, then share and export your notes. Its new WebSlides, in closed beta testing, will enable you to create narrated presentations of Web pages that you've saved and annotated.

Diigo is meant to be more practical than something like StumbleUpon, a fun way to discover new sites. Diigo Vice President Maggie Tsai touted Diigo WebSlides at the Office 2.0 conference today as an ideal tool for teachers. Her demo showed off handy-looking recording and playback controls for making presentations out of your saved pages and then sharing them with groups of other users. The slide shows also display text you've highlighted or notes you've taken on bookmarked sites. Unfortunately, you can't test WebSlides yet; only a beta wait list sign-up is available for now.

I use Diigo instead of Delicious because it has more research-friendly features, and it can simultaneously save stuff to Delicious, Newsvine, and other services. Diigo's toolbar and pop-ups could be easier to use, and I wish it could annotate PDFs. Still, I'm hoping that more changes will continue to come along as the beta service matures.

Stickis is a new service that lets you attach little sticky-type notes to Web pages you visit and lets you view the notes other people have left on pages.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

There was a service like this during the last Internet bubble. The product, ThirdVoice, was criticized as allowing "graffiti" on Web pages, since anyone's markups would be visible to any other ThirdVoice user. Stickis is different. The idea with this service is that you intentionally subscribe to various commentators (such as bloggers), then when you visit a site that one of these writers has a note on, it pops up on your screen. You can respond to their note with one of your own.

Bloggers can also add their feeds to Stickis, so every post they write automatically becomes a note linked to whatever sites they are linking to. Actually, anybody can do this for any blog. For instance, if there's an obscure political blogger you like, and you want to know when he writes about the stories you read on CNN, you can add his feed to your subscription list, and whenever he links to a story you're reading on CNN or any other site, you'll see a little alert pop up on the story page so that you can jump over to his blog and read the post.

I tried this with Webware.com (of course). It was simply a matter of giving Stickis the URL. Then when I went to sites I'd recently covered, such as WhoToTalkTo and LicketyShip, I got a note pointing me back to my posts. Pretty slick.

There are some user interface issues the site has to work through. For example, it's unclear how publishers will get the word out that they are writing Stickis content. In the beta I saw, I was automatically subscribed to several channels of content (all of them, I believe), and it was up to me to unsubscribe from the ones I didn't want. If Stickis takes off, opting out of new channels as they pop up won't be a satisfactory way to manage your content. Also, the Stickis plug-in is available for Internet Explorer only right now. [Update: the Firefox plug-in is done. See CEO Mark Meyer's comments to this post.]

But this is a really interesting idea. It links Web sites together by content automatically, sort of like Sphere and YooNo. And I love the idea of the portable expert: With Stickis, you can take your favorite bloggers with you wherever you go on the Net. That's just incredibly cool. The service could stand to lose some of its advanced features in the name of not confusing the heck out of its users, but the underlying idea is powerful.