Social Bookmarking The Way It Was Meant To Be (Social)

Is it interesting to find out a new bookmarking service is launched? You may already know my opinion: I think we already have too many duplicates for most of the web services already. But it is really very interesting to hear news about something that definitely aims directly at del.icio.us and plans to compete with the leader - not with some smaller players in the field. So when I got to know a new social bookmarking service that promises to be better than del.icio.us and states it is already more popular in Europe I was impressed. So I went there to take a look. And now I think they have a chance to win.

The service is named Mister Wong and until today it has not been available in English. Mister Wong was founded in Germany in March 2006, and since then has become the leading social bookmarking service in Europe with more than 2 million monthly visitors in Europe alone. Now they provide specialized bookmarking portals in other languages - Russian, Chinese, French and Spanish. I have visited the Russian version and found it to be an active bookmarking community - though it is definitely too early to tell it has plenty of bookmarks but still you can easily find some Russian-language gems here.

The English version is currently in the closed beta and I think it is a good idea to keep it closed and get as much feedback as possible from the choosy blogging and bookmarking English-speaking community because although the website is impressive it looks like it needs some minor changes to be actually welcomed by many frequent del.icio.us users. But anyway one thing where Mister Wong clearly leaves del.icio.us behind is the social aspect: unlike many other bookmarking services Mister Wong actually focuses on social side of bookmarking - here you can create your profile (for other users to be able to find you, join various specialized public and private groups and add other members as buddies. You can also create your own group according to your interests and choose if you want to make it public or private (so that only group members could see the bookmarks in the group). After you join a group (it takes only one click) you will be able to send your bookmarks to the groups and their members will start voting on the bookmarks (simply up or down).

As for actual bookmarking operations the service is superb, it provides absolutely everything I could think of as a nice feature. Adding a bookmark can easily be done via the web or using browser toolbar, buttons or extensions (the bookmark is named, described and tagged as usually). Besides, you can import your existing bookmarks from your browser and from del.icio.us - I tested both options and they worked absolutely smoothly. After importing your bookmarks you can perform group operations on them (changing tags). It is also possible to change status of bookmarks (those you import from browsers have the default private status while those you import from del.icio.us - public), delete them or recommend to your friend by email or by typing the buddies' usernames (here my suggestion would be to provide me with a list of all buddies to choose from in the event I do not remember exactly what the username of the buddy I want to share the bookmark with is).

Tags that are always located in your right sidebar make navigation easier for you (you can choose between tag cloud or list view for tags). You can also join several tags into separate tag bundles so that you could easily browse all your bookmarks tagged with related words.

Mister Wong also offers you some nice search options - instead of searching inside the body of the whole bookmark you can specify if you want to search the bookmarks themselves or tags; it is also possible to search your own or community's bookmarks. Again, everything concerning bookmarks is really intuitive and the service actually provides features you have not had before but will soon be unable to live without, I think.

What I actually like best about Mister Wong is its friendly and simple design. It is very clean, the space is not cluttered but at the same time it is not as terribly boring as del.icio.us (where I know how bookmarking works but am often unwilling to spend any extra time browsing bookmarks not to be bored to death). But honestly, in some cases usability is not perfect: for example, after you delete an existing bookmark you will be sent to a blank confirmation page instead of to where you were before that - in the bookmarks list. So you will need to click My favorites link to be taken back. And I don't think it's wise to complicate your users with two different words for bookmarks on one website: when you want to submit a new bookmark via the web you will need the ‘Bookmark' section while to perform operations on your existing bookmarks you will need the ‘Favorites' section. I do hope that the status of the closed beta will allow the developers to change certain usability issues before letting the mainstream users rant about them.

Another thing I think I should mention is that I would prefer to have at least some synchronization between different language portals of Mister Wong. I mean, I registered for the English version first but I could not register the same user name for the Russian version (though my English version login did not work here anyway). Besides, after I imported my browser bookmarks I noticed I had lots of Russian-language bookmarks and after hesitating for a while I had to leave them private while an option to transfer them to the Russian account could really be a big plus. I know, the idea behind Mister Wong is to build separate bookmarking resources for different languages but I know that many bilingual users will face the same problem after the English version is public and growing popular.

But anyway spending the whole 3 hours on a service I thought I would review in an hour at the most really means that I like it - Mister Wong works smoothly and is sufficiently intuitive and user-friendly even in the current state with the minor linguistic and usability disadvantages I have already mentioned. I do hope Mister Wong developers will give me some invitations for at least some of our readers to be able to see for themselves this exciting service so leave your comments below and I'll go plead for invites.

UPDATE: After asking for the invites I was told that everyone will get a personal invitation to Mister Wong after he or she leaves his e-mail address on www.mister-wong.com. So there's no need to worry you will have to wait for long before trying the service out - go ahead and simply ask for an invite.