NetVouz: Bookmark You

Tossing its hat into the social bookmark ring is NetVouz.   NetVouz is competing with nearly one hundred already existing social bookmakring sites, including del.icio.us, Furl , Reddit and StumbleUpon.  In fact, there are so many sites that offer social bookmarking services we have several articles on the topic here at Profy.

Each of these social bookmarking sites tries to set itself apart by offering a unique twist or feature. For example, Digg has made its name by combining a social bookmarking feature with a user-submitted news slant and added user rankings to the mix to keep it fresh.  Fark relies on the witty comment section and “audience participation” aspect of social bookmarking to stay in the forefront.  What sets NetVouz apart?

The ability to truly manage your bookmarks online using more than just tag clouds is the main feature that sets NetVouz apart. They offer tagged sorting and searching to appeal to the tag cloud junkies, and they also offer folders. This is a blessing for people like myself who are just plain sick of the messy looking tag clouds like those found on del.icio.us and Technorati. Don't get me wrong, tags are a great search tool, but I prefer the streamlined nature of folders for actually using an app like this. 

I also like their interface. It's clean and fits the “web 2.0 mold” as far as having bright colors and no clutter. More important, it is functional. NetVouz is more than just a pretty face. It offers bookmark buttons, link, feed options, FireFox plugins and several other tools to make actually using their service quick and convenient while you surf the web. 

After you are signed in, you can choose to import your bookmarks from any of the popular browsers or from another social bookmarking program.  You can also import your bookmarks from any OPML file.  If you want to import bookmarks from multiple sources, you can do that on your account home page by selecting “Import Bookmarks” from the File drop down menu.

Once your bookmarks are imported, you can sort them by tag words and folders. You can also make them public or private, and have the NetVouz platform search for any broken or duplicate bookmark links. The broken link finder was especially useful for me – I've had some of these bookmarks for years.   

With an interface that should please social bookmark site users and Web 2.0 afficionados, a variety of useful tools and a workable platform, NetVouz should be a contender against the heavy hitters. So far they are also doing an excellent job fighting the spam war that comes with any social site, and their site had no drag or slow loading times for me at all. All of this may explain why eBizMBA ranked them an up and coming #14 among all the social bookmarking sites in August 2007. I think this may replace some of the other sites as my social bookmark resource of choice.