Web 2.0 Part IIa: Social Bookmarking

After writing my post on tagging, I got sidetracked by Marnie Webb’s mention of ma.gnolia, and then went off to investigate, then decided to write about social bookmarking tools. Ma.gnolia is a new(ish) social bookmarking tool. There are some interesting comparison’s out there – see Notmyself, Phil Crissman, and Jeff Croft for a good review of Ma.gnolia’s open API.

First, I’ll do a quickie review of the social bookmarking phenomena and why I’ve been using del.icio.us, and why I’m switching to Ma.gnolia. And then, I’ll ask myself some questions about it.

So, all browsers keep bookmarks – it helps one easily go back to and find sites that you go to regularly. These days, most browsers have a nice bookmark bar – that really helps organize sites you visit regularly. But what about sites people who do the same kinds of work that you do, or like the same kinds of things that you do? You could google for them, but wouldn’t it be great to see other people’s links – things they found organically? Also, wouldn’t it be great if no matter where you were, you could get to your bookmarks?

So those are the reasons I use a social bookmarking tool, like del.icio.us. (Here’s a pretty complete list of tools from listible, another kind of social bookmarking tool.) I have to admit that my reasons have more to do with the latter (getting at my bookmarks in an organized fashion (i.e. tagged) from anywhere,) but I do like, on occasion, to find people who are kinda like me, and find out what their bookmarks are – and I like contributing my bookmarks. Which, in the end, is why I’m choosing to switch from del.icio.us to Ma.gnolia. I like the interface better, and the social part of the bookmarking is actually a lot better done (they have groups, as well as contacts.)

But some comments on the whole phenomenon. First, the major problem is that there are, at this point, so many of them, and although many (most?) of them have open APIs (that is, they allow other software to interact with them, and grab data, or add data,) they aren’t really interoperable (see Marshall Kirkpatricks excellent post on issues regarding Yahoo and del.icio.us and other of it’s acquisitions – adding another good reason to switch away from del.icio.us.) In the sense that there isn’t a way to, for instance, add the same bookmark to several social bookmarking sites at once (there is, however, a cool greasemonkey script that allows you to copy del.icio.us bookmarks to ma.gnolia.) You basically have to either decide which site has your loyalty, and then stay with that one (or spend a lot of time importing and exporting and double/treble/quadruple bookmarking. It should be interesting to see how this plays out. del.icio.us clearly has had the lion’s share of attention for a while, but who knows how long this will remain.

The next question is, well, how useful is this anyway? In some ways, I use social bookmarking tools like listible as a more directed google (I’ve yet to create any lists). I use furl to keep pages that have content that I absolutely want to keep, in case the site goes away (furl could go away, of course, so maybe I should save that stuff to my hard drive – they have a cool export feature.) Bookmarking saves me time, for sure. But it’s also true that a lot of the "social" in social bookmarking has been more of a time suck than a time saver.

But, as I’ve said, it’s not all about efficiency. Does it really connect me to people? Sometimes, but not generally. In general, at least del.icio.us’ focuses more on the metadata aspects of the social part of social bookmarking (centered around tags). Ma.gnolia seems better. We’ll see. But in the meantime, social bookmarking tools are I think a useful part of Web 2.0.