My favorite social sites for… Social Bookmarking

My favorite development is personal online publishing has been in storing bookmarks. I know I’m a simpleton, but I cannot remember the addresses of places I visit all of the time, or the phone numbers of dear friends, or the e-mail addresses of people who aren’t dear enough to call or anything, but…

Suffice it to say, I need services like these in a bad way. And I cannot always trust the bookmarks on the browser I am using, since I could be at home, or at work, or at my parents’ or my sister’s or my girlfriend’s place. I need bookmarks to be stored online, so no matter where I go, I can find my things.

My Bookmarks was an early success, as was del.icio.us. A lot of people think My Bookmarks got buried by del.icio.us because del.icio.us was easier to share favorite places with. In truth, I think My Bookmarks was killed by Yahoo! and Google personal pages. Both services allow you to create a bookmark section of your own page, usually of places you don’t want to share.

But so much for failures. Del.icio.us was the site that figured out the importance of getting users to add tagging to content – a technique that would be copied by nearly every other social media application afterwards. (In fact, a couple of years ago, before everyone was bandying about this term, “social media,” I was still calling it all, “social bookmarking.” Memories. Like the corners of my mind.)

My own favorite site, however, is StumbleUpon. StumbleUpon allows you to pick favorites and share them with others, but you have the added option of “stumbling” – or randomly going to a page one of the other users has made a favorite, and is relevant to the user’s own interests. It is also a brilliant system for getting other users who have similar interests to visit your site. If what you have on display is of high quality, that quick, heavy burst of traffic can work wonders.

Of course, when I’m not trying to promote something or learn what everyone else is doing, I still use my Google Bookmarks. Mostly because every machine I use seems to have the Google Toolbar on it anyway, so it becomes very easy to save and access stuff. Otherwise, frankly, a LOT of these services are creepily similar. Then again, how sexy can you really make bookmarks?

A lot of people may say that Digg and Reddit and Propeller are social bookmarking sites, which is sort of true. You are saving bookmarks to content that interests you. I prefer to think of these as social news sites, though, since they tend to revolve around current events. For example, there aren’t a lot of people “Digging” the page to get a U.S. passport, after all. But on delicious.com (they changed the name. Grr.) there are 533 other users who saved this page to their collections.

If you’re looking for more of these sites to check out, you can always go to Wikipedia to find a pretty happening list of them. They’ll help you read more about it.

Yes kids, TV used to be REALLY bad.

written at September 3rd, 2008 and is filed under Social Networking, Tech, Trends. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.