Four Social Bookmarking Services Compared

Del.icio.us
Del.icio.us(or delicious.com as of a little while ago) was purchased by Yahoo! andis probably the most popular social bookmarking tools online. It ispretty geek-o-centric, meaning that there are more tech resources savedthere than anything else, but it‘s really got a lot of user contributedresources on a wide variety of topics. I was very upset whenDel.icio.us was bought by Yahoo! because I thought it should be apublic utility (seriously, that would have been awesome).
Del.icio.us has a "mark as private" option, an API (applicationprogramming interface) that many people have used to create supportingservices or plug-ins and is universally found wherever socialbookmarking is engaged in. Social networking services (add this personas my friend) have recently been added to make subscribing to otherpeoples‘ bookmarks easy for people intimidated by RSS feeds. You can bepretty sure that del.ico.us is going to be around for a long timebecause a large number of geeks would freak out if it ended.
The downsides include that the user interface (the look and feel) isrelatively unfriendly, improvements on the system have slowed downgreatly since the Yahoo! acquisition (continuous development should bea strong point for web based software as a service) and the system isowned by a company that has sent a number of users to Chinese prisonsand where at least one executive says about whether his company wouldhave collaborated with Nazis -"I don’t know how I would have felt then."That‘s probably just hyperbole, though, and at a relatively apocalyptictime like today I don‘t know that any particular corporate executivecan be blamed for moral ambiguity.
Del.icio.us also lacks some key features that other services offer.
Ma.gnolia
Ma.gnolia.com(magnolia.com takes you to Exxon-Mobil in case you were wondering) is a visually appealing system that emphasizes easy group sharing. It alsosaves a copy of every page you tag into your archive - something thatcan be very helpful when sites of interest are changed or removed.
This system has a nice tag cloud for quick selection of tagsyou‘ve applied to other pages. There is also the option to mark a pageas private in your archive.
This is a new system, but it‘s got most of the basic featuresand judging by the featured taggers the people behind it arepolitically sympathetic to social justice concerns.
The company blog is active and that‘s a good sign. You can easily import bookmarks into Ma.gnolia and out of it.
Blogger extraordinaire Brian Benzinger, who I did , wrote .
Furl.net
Furlis one of the oldest social bookmarking tools online and is owned bythe Looksmart company - one of the first search engines on the web. IinterviewedMichael Grubb from Looksmart about social bookmarking and Furl for nonprofits here on NetSquared.
Furl offers many features that few other services have. It saves a copyof tagged web pages, it offers very good recommendations of sites, tagsand other users based on your archive and it offers export in ALA orMLA bibliographic formats. Searching inside Furl will display resultsfrom your archive, followed by the archives of other users and thenfrom the web at large via Looksmart‘s search engine.
Many librarians use Furl and the system‘s users are very loyal.I stopped using it myself when I decided that the topic or tagselection mechanism was intolerably unusable. Unfortunately, Furldoesn‘t appear to be a system that is being actively developed orupgraded. Nonetheless, many people may really like its feature set.
Markaboo
Markaboo is a very new social bookmarking service, it was launched less than a week ago. Here‘s whyI‘ve exported my bookmarks from del.ico.us and into Markaboo:
Markaboo is open source, under a Creative Commons license. Thatmeans that interested programmers can access and work with its code.That‘s key in making it responsive to user needs.
You can add notes pages to your Markaboo archive, items made upjust of your own text and tagged as you see fit but not necessarilytied to a specific web page I‘ve added to my archive.
You can take photos from a mobile device and SMS them, with title and tags, into your Markaboo archive. Now that is sweet.
The system is still just being born, but the developers are veryresponsible to user feedback and I have every reason to believe thatthis is going to be fantastic. I‘ll be using it from now on - unless Idecide to export my archive some where else later! I wrote a review ofMarkaboo, which was followed by a number of comments from readers,over at TechCrunch this weekend.
Conclusion
I hope that this has been a helpful look at some corners of the socialbookmarking/tagging world. It‘s an ever changing world and the demandsof users help the tools develop. If you need more reasons to use tags,check out an article I wrote called13 Reasons to Use Tags. Again, to see even more options, try searching for sites tagged SocialBookmarking inside all of these systems, expeciallyin del.icio.us.
With practice I imagine you‘ll find reading feeds and tagging itemsthat come through those feeds will become a common practice for manymore people. I can‘t imagine how I used the web without these tools.
Read the full post here:Tips on choosing a social bookmarking tool
Submitted by marshallkirkpatrick on June 19, 2006 - 8:30pm