Notifir - Track Your Social Bookmarking Accounts

There are several different social bookmarking sites around, and many people use more than one of them on a daily basis. Keeping track of all of these account can be time-consuming. Until now, there has not really been a service that aims to make this task easier.

Notifir is an interesting new tracking service, which has just gone public, that plans to simplify the process of managing and keeping track of social bookmarking accounts from one central location.

Eventually, the service plans to integrate data from several social bookmarking sites (Netscape, StumbleUpon, Reddit), but Digg is currently the only supported site.

The interface seems to be well designed, and the dashboard provides a simple layout of information, including your most recent Digg submissions in the past 24 hours, how many votes each one has, who voted, and a link to both the Digg page and the original source. Filters are available to narrow your results, and there are numerous different ways in which users can analyze and view information about other Diggers. The ability to digg directly from the Notifir service or at least make submissions seems to be missing.

Notifir also gives users the ability to ask all of their friends to vote on their stories. I am not quite sure how the Digg community is about this, but generally this strategy is looked down upon. I used a similar tactic directly on Netscape in the past, using the built in messaging tool, and needless to say, my account was banned. It was a lesson learned, so I am a little wary of this feature. Just a heads up!

With all of that said, Notifir is not so much of a new social web 2.0 tool, as it is a management service to organize your efforts on various sites. The service's ability to do this, however, is hard to test currently, since it only works with one social bookmarking site. As more features roll out, I am sure that it will start heading more towards it focus.

Speaking of future features, I found Notifir's feature request system very interesting. It uses a Digg-style service that allows users to vote on which features that they would like to see integrated into the news tracking service. This is a well-executed use of Pligg (an open-source Digg clone) that other new services should think about using to get similar feedback and interaction from users.

Notifir's goals make it seem like it has a shot at being very useful, but it is still too early to tell. If it can offer more features than the social bookmarking services themselves, and keep them much more organized together in one place, I may find myself using it in the future to keep track of articles.

Until then, I can just stick to keeping track of Digg at Digg's website, instead of using Digg to make submissions and then using Notifir to track them.