I decided to set for myself the task of recommending a bookmarking service. After exploring a bit, I alterd my goal. Promoting a specific application would be presumptious on my part. I do not have enough experience with the options and the decision really comes down to personal preferences. A few comments and several links may be more valuable.
As I struggled with my initial goal, some of the comments made by Nicholas Negroponte (at NECC) came back to me (BTW – his comments are available as a podcast from the Apple Music Store). His comment on the commercial software/hardware scene pretty much claimed that vendors must create more powerful software and hardware to continue to attract business. The goal is to assure income by creating more powerful stuff rather than creating less expensive stuff capable of doing a fixed set of things. An unintended consequence may be that the powerful stuff is less friendly to use and perhaps more cumbersome than most users would require.
The connection? Consider ease of use relative to power/features when commiting to a bookmarking service. Perhaps some of the more sophisticated and full-featured programs may exceed your needs.
Some other bloggers attempting to provide product comparisons:
My personal experience includes:
- Creating and sharing bookmarks and annotations created within a desktop browser
- del.icio.us
- Furl
- Scuttle
- Diigo
Here are some comments.
Scuttle might be useful if you have access to a server and enjoy having control of a bookmarking site. Control might involve defining the general purpose for the bookmarking site and limiting those who are allowed to contribute.
My personal favorite among these options is FURL. This site not only allows storage of the URL, tags, and personal annotations, but also saves a copy of the site on a specific day (which may differ from what the site displays on a different day and clearly different if the actual site goes away).
I am guessing that del.icio.us is the most popular bookmarking site. It is easy to use. Popularity may be an issue because the “social” part of social bookmarking depends on others and theoretically the more “others” with interests that match your own the better. I think popularity may play one other role. I wonder how all of these sites are going to survive. I would think popularity would have something to do with the business model sustaining a site. A popular site would seem more attractive if it uses ads because it would expose more users to the ads. A popular site would also seem more attractive as a service provided by a funding source (e.g., Yahoo, Google, Microsoft) – the business model in this case concerns the potential to attract users to a location associated with other “paying” services.
Diigo is my most recent “experiment.” Diigo uses an interesting approach to annotation (I think I remember the site describing what they offer as social annotation). Imagine a clear layer over the web page you are viewing. This layer may contain your personal highlighting and postit-like notes. Your private and other’s public additions become visible when the site is viewed. The value of this approach to you may depend on how much importance you place on the comments provided by others. Diigo also allows sites it bookmarks to be automatically added to several other bookmarking services (although I could not figure out how to add the annotations to a second service). I want to see if this service is around 6 months from now before I get too excited. I do think some of the features are interesting.
In general, I prefer to see several competitors working to create comparable products. Such competition drives innovation. Having said this and aside from the issue of survival, the nature of social software sometimes means that value increases with participants. Mechanisms for easily exporting personal resources to multiple services would be one way for any individual to create a situation in which it would make sense to pick from a number of services depending on which seemed most appropriate to an immediate need.
