CoReap – Social Search and Bookmarking

CoReap is a new service that combines social bookmarking, social searching and a social network. It allows users to manage their bookmarks and their network directly from the sidebar of the browser for complete ease of use.

What is innovative about CoReap is the way that it seamlessly integrates with existing search platforms such as Google and Yahoo!. With CoReap, you can actually search for new bookmarks by creating a social network of trusted individuals based on your interests. Those results can be found through traditional web search engines or in other social bookmarking sites.

"The basic idea behind CoReap is that people make decisions based primarily on a few people whom they trust," said a representative of CoReap. "If the opinions of these trust-worthy people can be collected and shared in a private environment, then this process can be incredibly useful, simply because it is based on trustable human-intelligence." Users categorize their bookmarks with keywords or tags, which then allow other users to find those links. Other ways to discover links include by category or the random way.

To get started, there is a small application that you must download, which then runs in the sidebar of your web browser. It is currently available for Firefox browsers only, which may be a downside for users of other browsers (an Internet Explorer version is in the works). Through the application, you can search for websites, add them to your bookmarks, and filter by tags. Inviting and managing your friends is also done from within the sidebar.

With the sidebar app installed, a search using Google or Yahoo! will also provide CoReap social search results embedded within the traditional search results on the page. This is a great feature that allows you to keep searching the same way most people currently do, through a search engine. You don't have to learn a new way, which often complicates services like this.

To make bookmarking and finding new bookmarks easiers, CoReap provides 2 toolbar buttons, which will allow you to bookmark a page or view a randomly selected page, similar to the way StumbleUpon works. The toolbar buttons are included with the download of the browser sidebar application.

CoReap is a great service, in the fact that it adapts to your way of searching and finding resources instead of forcing you to adapt to a new way. When compared with its competition, including Blogrovr and Particls, CoReap is the least intrusive and the easiest to get started with, if you ask me.

(UPDATE: The CoReap sidebar is now also available for Internet Explorer . Thank you Andy for the notice.)