The Evolution of Social Bookmarking

Prior to its worldwide re-introduction (itList is where it all started, circa 1996) through the underground hit, Del.icio.us, social bookmarking was – and to some, it still is – an item that puzzled many. I know I was lost for quite some time on what it even meant. Now, just a couple of years since social bookmarking walked onto the main stage to help power you and I in getting the most out of the next-generation internet, it is essential in networking us with our friends, colleagues, and even strangers from both local and distant whereabouts. The initial buzz has died down and shared bookmarks are nearly as standard-issue as blog posts, so I think it’s time to pay the founders and creators a visit to catch up, see what’s new, and see what’s cookin’.

Before the bubble burst, when social bookmarking was in its “infancy”, there were a slew of sites that specialized in remotely retaining your bookmarks: Backflip, Clip2, and Blink. Still, it wasn’t social in the way the term is known today. Things have changed since then, however. Real-time tracking by way of RSS has brought new meaning to ‘social’. Now, Web 2.0 sites are unable to operate without the technology.

Evolution

RSS is one of many keys to the success of social bookmarks, but there are also subtleties that make someone choose one service over another. It can be as simple as showing preference to a particular layout or design, or wanting that one option that no one else seems to have bothered to include. For instance, Blinklist (the re-launched Blink) with its IM-enabled message board, may trump Del.icio.us’ plain-Jane approach for some.

It is my opinion that Del.icio.us is the most popular of today’s offerings available to the world’s bookmarkers, a result of three simple but hardly replicable factors: timing, naming, and the way virtual winds were blowing back in 2003. They enabled a staid and mostly unknown invention from the mid-90s to become something cool once more. It didn’t matter that some would have no real need for the utility. Sharing links and tagging pages and blog posts is just what you do these days. But what makes Del.icio.us the best? Why does Del.icio.us get to stick their tongue out at Blinklist? What about miniscule items like Simpy and RawSugar? They eat the crumbs off the social bookmarking table, but what says one’s better than the other?

With millions of blogs cropping up every year nowadays, it’s more necessary than ever to efficiently wade through countless posts to find what you’re looking for. Tagging organizes the mess, and if tag search is all you want, Technorati, and, to a lesser extent, RawSugar, will bode just fine for you. They don’t have everything, but there’s enough in either to occupy yourself with for quite a while.

You might be wondering, “Isn’t tagging, tagging; and bookmarking, bookmarking?” Yes and no. When RSS was first introduced, tags and bookmarks remained separate. Now, they’re pretty much mutually exclusive. Software today enables tags to act as live bookmarks, and vice versa.

Explainer

Bookmarks are like, well… bookmarks. Imagine that you’ve got a reference text in your hands, and you’re earmarking pages all over the place. What if you find yourself with dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of little memos of where you were, what pages you’ve seen? Backtracking would be useless. So what would be the next best thing to a photographic memory? The ability to search your history. Now, take that idea to the next level. What’s the next level?

It’s where sites like Del.icio.us, Blinklist, and Technorati are right now. They don’t just offer you the option to go back to wherever you were before, connecting your dots into a personal web of remote information you’d otherwise lose track of very, very quickly. They also offer you the option of searching others’ histories, and more recently, the searching of searches.

Searches are ordinarily done via keywords, unless you know exactly what you’re looking for, in which case, bookmarking in general is an absolutely useless activity to you. But if your memory doesn’t tend to serve you well and you’d like to bank your footprints, as well as others’, you’d do well to get adjusted to one of the services that best appeals to you.

And the winner is…

I’m sure it’s no surprise that Del.icio.us comes out on the top of my list. I’m not exactly sure why I recommend it over all others. Maybe it’s just the Google syndrome, with the crowd rooting for the biggest and baddest of all. Yikes, if that’s the case, we should be waving Microsoft logos joyously.

What Del.icio.us does for me is give me an ample supply of links and tags, and gets out of the way. The database is extensive, the interface friendly, and it’s just the right mix of news, scoops, personal posts, and random oddities that it naturally fits my needs best. It could also be that I learned of its existence before having the chance to offer enough time to the competition and the clones to “switch”. But I blame that on the guerilla campaign waged by Del.icio.us and its earliest adopters a few years back. I do, however, find myself using Technorati more and more, particularly since starting at Profy. Their tag-searching engine is absolutely aces.

We’re still at a point where tagging is a tedious bore, but the persistence of millions to keep on keeping on with writing those keywords is what keeps all of us connected and keeps discovery fun and beneficial for everyone involved. We at Profy do our part to hold up our end of the bargain.

Whether you choose Blinklist for its featureful forum, Simpy and RawSugar for their “indie” status, or Del.icio.us for its user base, you can bet on getting something good out of a great – and increasingly powerful – system.