Social bookmarking explodes

Social bookmarking has entered its heroic age, where multiple actors content for a new, growing world.

In the begining was del.icio.us (my page here).  Elegant and fast, crisp and focused, Joshua's invention was rapidly taken up.  In tandem with Flickr (my Flickr page here) it kicked off the folksonomy furor.  Furl was there as well, if relatively unsung (and scarcely used by me).

Others have started to emerge.  del.irio.us took things a little further.  I noted RawSugar, which positions itself to attact del.icio.us users (my RawSugar page here), and adds a bit more personazation to one's self-presentation.  The same day I played with Sugar I also spotted Shadows, which wants to heighten bookmarking into larger commentary on web pages (NB: site seems to be down tonight).

Shel tells me about Connotea, which is aimed at the sciences.

The Wikipedia's social bookmarking entry lists still others.  More than thirty (30) others.  Are we seeing social bookmarking entering the YASN (yet another social network) phase of that movement?  Is the duplication of effort going to grow?  How much innovation can be attached to each new one to justify exporting one's growing list of links?

Comments

[Ladi]

As one of those people who suffers through a large enough bookmark list that I need gdesktop to get through it...I'm not sure I really see the *point* of social bookmarking to begin with. I have lots of esoterica buried in there and it's not the sort of stuff I want or need to see public nor is it what others would find particularly useful. I also rarely go to other peoples' lists of bookmarks to find things (and I'll note that googling doesn't usually turn up personal link/bookmark lists for me) and I'm not sure the commentary/tagging of a random stranger, as opposed to what my defined friendset has to say, is all that helpful.

Maybe what we really need is a social bookmarking system that allows for 'weighting' of what other people have to say based on who you define and allows permissions-based publication of links. Yes, information should be free...but really, some of this stuff is just clutter to the world at large and some of it is not shareable to others for a variety of reasons.

[Harold Jarche]

I find social bookmarks are good when you don't want to write a blog post. My Furl list gets a fair number of views (but no comments) so I presume that it provides a valuable service to some people:
http://www.furl.net/members/hjarche
I've tried delicious and JOTS but I don't feel a need to use more than one of these systems, even though Furl may not be the best.

[Melanie]

I'm doing a short unit on bookmarking for my new media class. I'm going to be expecting them to keep track of all their online readings this way and use delicious for their class projects. I made a folder with tag for their first project. All the example links I'm steering them to are located in that folder. So they'll be able to share project links and resources with each other by checking their classmates tags.

[Bryan]

Ladi, did you check out the ubertags from Shadows? That looks interesting in terms of weighting.

Good point about economy, Harold. It's a tool all about understatement - for now. I expect we'll see more bells and whistles hung about the space framework of del.icio.us.

Awesome, Mel. Got a URL or three for us to pounce on?

[Mike]

Given your interest in social bookmarking and social learning, I thought you might like to check out www.blinklist.com.

While we are still in our early phase, our vision is to focus very much on discovery, sharing, and learning so if you get the chance to check out our site it would be great to hear your toughts! Mike

[Prentiss Riddle]

Thanks for checking out Shadows and for getting the point that Shadows isn't just about bookmarking but about discussion.

You'd be surprised how many commentators on social bookmarking miss that. Which of course means that we need to do a better job of getting our message across.

I'd say that social bookmarking isn't in a YASN phase because, unlike the first wave of social networking applications, social bookmarking actually has a purpose: there's utility in the personal recall of tagging and there's real content to be found in looking at other people's tags. Add discussion to the mix and you have something far more powerful than just browsing around among the faces of friends of friends of friends.

Which isn't to say that it's easy for newcomers to the social bookmarking arena to to distinguish themselves from the pack.

Anyway, thanks for the mention.

[Jamie]

The most useful service I've found in the social bookmarking space is clipmarks.com. You can "clip" what you want from any site without having to bookmark the whole page (so glad someone figured out how to do that!). What you clip gets stored in your own on-line collection at www.clipmarks.com. From a social perspective, you can post clips publicly if you think others would find it interesting or to start a discussion. You add tags to any clip so it is easy to find again later, and you can search other people's tags in the public library. From a personal and social perspective, clipmarks is a great new option.