I finally got around to completing my ideas on social bookmarking in writing. I tried over twelve popular services to see which one would meet my needs best. I have not described much about how to use a social bookmarking service since the actual methods of usage can vary based on which service you pick. In general though, always try searching for tags that best describe your topic. Also see this article on searching to learn how to find information anywhere on the internet.

 

Why social bookmarking?

Since the emergence of del.icio.us it has become quite clear that this is an emerging trend and an excellent way to find information on the web. With the internet being vast and disorganized, even search engines are not good at determining relevance as well as humans are. Using socical bookmarking, a human tags relevant links under a similar category. Humans are better at determining the way different pieces of information link to each other. Social bookmarking is thus a way to improve meta data on the web and is a poster child of the web 2.0 applications.

Social bookmarking allows people to find relevant content to any topic on demand by looking at links with similar tags to one link. People can also rate links based on their relevance so they can find anything they need.

 

Current Shortfalls of Social Bookmarking

1) Little emphasis on privacy

Social bookmarking only becomes stronger as more people share their bookmarks. With this in mind, several social bookmarking services place little emphasis on the privacy of the users. Some don't even allow an option to make certain bookmarks private, and even when the option is offered, its a long painful process to making a bookmark private. Blinklist for example can allow you to make all your bookmarks public with a single click, but not the other way around. To make a set of bookmarks private you have to edit the options in each one individually. There is a way to decide if a bookmark should be private when creating it but options to edit bookmarks en masse later on are limited.

 

2) Too many around

In the days following the web explosion of hotmail, hundreds of companies sprang up offering free email services. Similarly there are too many social bookmarking services. This is a problem because unlike email, social bookmarking is not a purely private activity. Collecting links tagged with the same categories together allows users to discover new material hidden on the web. And obviously this is only a benefit if the community is large. With several bookmarking services to choose from, the community of online social bookmarkers has been divided. Del.icio.us, the original service with this idea may still be leading in number of users, but other services are not too far behind.

Bookmarking services are also not all alike. Connotea for instance caters mainly to the academic and research community and even provides options like adding using Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) to automatically identify authors and titles of academic articles. Such features are not found in other social bookmarking engines. This leads to further diversity and disintegration online. One possible long term solution is to create an open standard for sharing bookmarks and tags across various services. This way there is only one public repository of bookmarks and tag clouds while the services themselves are just gateways to access the bookmarks.

A solution for now is to simply sign up with several bookmarking services and then use another service like OnlyWire to integrate everything. Onlywire lets you post the same bookmark to several services at once. However, in the opposite way you cannot synchronize your browser's bookmarks with all those services or between services. Hopefully, onlywire might bring about this feature in the future. Several of the current services themselves have realized the need for integration and provided a way to import and keep synchronizing with a user's del.icio.us bookmarks. Such integration can also be extended to other services in the future.

 

3) Overdone Interface

This is more of a problem in certain services, not the entire idea. With AJAX now a buzzword, every new online service takes great pains in making AJAX part of their service. Good inititative, but to what extent should it be implemented? Del.icio.us has AJAX in some places, like the slider controls. Every other part of their site is simple and loads quick. This is an example others and particualrly Blinklist should follow. Blinklist's entire site's interface is AJAX based to such an extent that older browsers will simply not support it. While it looks nice, its also overdone. Those in a hurry to just use a quick efficient service will not like Blinklist. If you need a good example of where to draw the line between using AJAX and keeping it simple, take a look at any of Google's applications like Gmail or Page Creator.

 

4) Folksonomy Complications

This was a major point initially raised by critics on the disadvantage of using social bookmarking. Since the control on how to categorize links is left up to the user, haphazardness might result. Several words also have different meanings, depending on context. For instance, Brazil is a type of dye as well as a country. Proponents have said that this problem can be eliminated by encouraging users to liberally use tags. For instance, by tagging the Brazil dye links as "Brazil, dyes, coloring, printing" it is possible to distinguish the context of the word from the country which can be tagged as Brazil, South America, Samba, Soccer etc.

Several services also make bookmarking case sensitive. So, 'linux' is not the same as 'LiNux' or 'lINUx'. People also tend to mis spell words intentionally or otherwise leading to creation of meta garbage which confuses users. There are solutions to this problem. Several services intend to introduce a user guide in addition to the current help section. The user guide puts forward a possible naming convention encouraging all users to follow it. Some suggestions include using only small case in naming tags unless needed otherwise and using plurals instead of singulars. All services also offer a way for users to edit their existing tag names so that they can clean up any mistakes. That option isn't that successful since majority of users just tag once and forget about it afterwards.

Related tags and the overall tag cloud are also weighted in order of popularity, so mis spelled tags and wrongly assigned tags will be less popular and fade away further down the line in comparison to the commonly used tags. A heavily tagged link will thus automatically weed out the less popular tags and makes the system more relevant.

 

A Look at Some Current Services

This is not a long review where I walk through the features of each service at length. You can find that at the 3 spots blog and here.

Instead, I have stated a set of characteristics that I think any social bookmarking service should provide and then compared to see which of the current ones provide this. I think most people would like the following features on their social bookmarking service.

 

a) Upload & Download as HTML file

This is to allow your own backups and to allow importing existing bookmarks from your browser.

 

b) Auto synchronization

This means when you delete, add or edit a bookmark in your local browser's favorites, it should be automatically changed in the online profile as well.

 

c) Privacy

By default uploaded bookmarks should be private, only ones I choose to make public should become public. This is important. Some services just don't allow private bookmarks saying those who don't wish to share should probably stop using the internet itself. I think that statement is quite extreme and believe me its possible to find out a lot about a person and his habits by looking at his bookmark collection. People have lost jobs due to blogs and there is a lesson to be learnt there. I am sure we wouldn't like to see the same happen due to social bookmarks. While its nice to share and necessary for social bookmarking to work effectively, it should be up to the user to decide which bookmarks to share. Which brings us to the next point:

 

d) Batch Editing

It should be easy for users to share their bookmarks. They should be able to select a about a hundred or more per page and declare all of them as public or private. They shouldn't have to edit each bookmark individually and then declare it as private or public. I remember one service where I couldn't delete all my bookmarks with one click. I had to browse page after page and delete each one. Fortunately for them, I seem to have forgotten the name of the service.

 

e) Extensive Hierarchy

Free tagging without disturbing folder structure of imports i.e. Sub categorization should be possible. Free tagging and folksonomy are a great alternative way to arrange content, but not everything can be reduced to a single level of categories. Besides, people don't like their folder structure which they might have spent hours to put together to be disturbed. For example, I might have

Computers

-> 1) Art (Bryce, Photoshop etc.)
-> 2) Security (Anti-Virus, Firewalls etc.)
-> 3) Hardware (Hard Disks, Mainboards, peripherals etc.)

4) Art (Sculptures, paintings)
5) Security (Locks, Alarm systems, Dogs)
6) Hardware (Screwdrivers, Duct Tape, Saws)

The three sub folders under computers have to do with computer art, computer security and computer hardware. The three folders outside have to do with physical art, home security and workshop hardware. Now, if all this were to be reduced to a single level, as many social bookmarking services do, can you see a problem? At least multiple tags should be applied like this :

1) Computers, Art
2) Computers, Security
3) Computers, Hardware
4) Art
5) Security
6) Hardware

Or tag bunching/grouping should be automatically done by grouping items 1, 2 and 3 under Computers. del.icio.us allows bunching, but a bookmark cannot be tagged under a bunch name but rather under on of the sub categories under it. Another nice option would be to allow the user to define relationships between tags.

 

f) Clippings

There are times when we bookmark a page not for the entire content but rather one particular paragraph or sentence on the page. Some services allow clippings, whereby you can select a portion of the text on a page and allow that to be added as a note when bookmarking the page.

 

g) Archive of Saved Pages

Only Furl, Spurl and ma.gnolia have this one so far. It saves a copy of that page under your account. Over time, you have your own personal content directory to search from. Since many pages have content that might not be accurately represented by the page title, this feature is important. It allows a person to search his personal archive to locate a page when all he can recall is a word or phrase that might have occured somewhere on the page.

 

h) Bookmarks Sidebar

Similar to Opera and Firefox standard bookmarks. This should allow a person to view his social bookmarks on the side bar, possibly through the installation of an extension or through the use of frames. This will allow for easy navigation.

 

i) Ratings

This is to allow a person to filter the bookmarks based on quality as voted by other users.

 

j) Connection to Other Services - The del.icio.us Effect

del.icio.us has the largest number of users while Connotea has a large number of users from the academic community. This places both these services in a strong position having captured a good deal of their market. It also makes it necessary for other services to think about how they can allow their users to synchronize their accounts with a del.icio.us or connotea account so that they can effective explore the bookmarks among the commnuity there. This is important until someone decides to create an open standard for social bookmarking as I suggested earlier.

 

Conclusion

No service I've seen at the moment offers all of the above, but there are some which come pretty close. Many services also have an API to allow developers to make their own plugins to further extend the use. Also bear in mind that even if you don't personally use social bookmarking, you can still browse and search the tags to find information. Doing that doesn't even require making an account and the search results can often be far better than those from a search engine, especially with niche topics.

The Best

Netvouz (a,c,d,e,f,h,i,j) - Has a quick and extremely easy to use interface with batch editing and whatever else you need. Has a clean up option to delete all your bookmarks and tags in a single click in case you wish to import a new bookmarks.html file again. Certainly deserves to be more popular than del.icio.us and might have too, had it been on the scene earlier. The one problem is like del.icio.us, it doesn't like spaces in tag names. While del.icio.us removes the spaces, this one breaks up each word into a tag.

Thus del.icio.us would change a folder named international political science to internationalpoliticalscience, while Netvouz would apply three tags (international, political and science) to those bookmarks. Note that folders are not the same as tags in Netvouz. Folders/Directories is just a way to organize how you see bookmarks while the tags is a way to classify the item. Netvouz automatically uses the page title and the folder name to apply tags to the item. This results in way too many tags, some of which are completely useless.

Note : The Netvouz description in this post was edited again on 2006/04/10. Also see this post for more details.

* The brackets contain the references corresponding to my feature requests above.

 

Runners Up

Rawsugar (a,c,e,j)

Its biggest ability is being able to maintain your folder hierarchy perfectly and it also allows spaces in tag names. There is no way to clean up the account and start over like Netvouz and batch editing of links is quite difficult. The only thing batch edit allows is editing of your tag names and hierarchies.

 

del.icio.us (a,b,c,h)- Quite plain by itself, but the extensive number of add-ons available for it make it meet some of the stated requirements. Its got the largest community and is now owned by Yahoo, so you can expect more features in the future. Its only major weakness is the lack of hierarchy among categories (i.e. everything is reduced to a single level) and a lack of batch editing. Also does not like spaces in tag names and will remove them upon import. So, 'fast cars' will become 'fastcars'. Has a bookmark plugin in firefox to allow auto synchronization, but that only works one way by keeping your local copy up to date with the del.icio.us bookmarks rather than the other way around. Frankly, if not for the fact that it was the first on the scene, it wouldn't have such a large following. The simple interface is also a plus and loads quickly. You might want to use the del.icio.us direc.tor service to make the interface easier to navigate.

Those that failed the test include Blinklist, Furl, Simpy, Spurl, Wink, ma.gnolia and many more. I can expect these services to also introduce new features soon so their users need not dump the service yet. There are also a lot of other services out there which I could not review. If you come across a service which meets all the features I described here, please let me know right away. I will be sure to thank you on my next post ;-)

 

Future Expectations

With social bookmarking being such a big phenomenon, web portals have wasted no time into moving into this area. Yahoo now owns del.icio.us while MSN has introduced their own improved bookmark manager and search engine with Windows Live, which is still in beta. Google has a personalized search, but no social bookmarking service as yet. Google is however known to take a slow and steady approach to things and its services often become more popular than others due to the features and quality. Gmail was after all, introduced in 2004, nearly 9 years after hotmail and still managed to capture quite a lot of the market from the former. I can hope that future and present bookmarking services will take note of comments like mine and others and tune their service accordingly to offer more options. I also expect search engines to give more relevance to social bookmarking services in their results since the quality of these links is usually higher.