Unsocial Bookmarking
Monday, June 19th, 2006 by Mike Rundle
Out of everyone on my buddylist, I’d say that only 1-2 people actually use del.icio.us or other social bookmarking apps. I’ve never used them just because they serve no purpose to me — if I like a site I’ll bookmark it on my own computer, and if I really like a site then I’ll probably write about it on my weblog. Social bookmarking apps don’t really add any value to my browsing experience that sites like Digg and Techmeme don’t already give me.
Do you bookmark socially? Am I an idiot for not trying them out?
Reader Comments
39 Responses to “Unsocial Bookmarking”
Is Digg not a social bookmarking engine of sorts? I guess they frown when you submit a duplicate, but in the end, it’s one big place for shared URLs, no?
Although switching browsers is kind of a chore, it seems like if you really wanted to store bookmarks locally, using Flock would be the best option. Local + Shared.
June 19th, 2006 at 3:52 am
I think the difference is that “normal” social bookmarking sites don’t reward people for submitting a really interesting link. With Digg (and Newsvine) it’s a thrill to see a link you submitted (or maybe it was your site) get to the frontpage because that’s a difficult accomplishment. At del.icio.us I could submit the first link to newcompanyhere.com and then if 100 people follow suit, what benefit do I get?
Digg gives you the benefit of social bookmarking along with the added fun of finding a cool site before anybody else. Del.icio.us and other social bookmarking sites only let you share, but give you no thrills.
June 19th, 2006 at 3:56 am
I use social bookmarking not for the social features, but just for bookmarking - I use two computers (and three OSes) at home + one at work, so it helps me keep my bookmarks in one place. If my public bookmarks may help other people find some interesting content - that’s cool, but it’s only a side effect, not the reason to use public bookmarks.
June 19th, 2006 at 4:48 am
I don’t bookmark socially, but I do use del.icio.us because it’s an easy way to keep my bookmarks available from any machine that I happen to be on, and it allows me to tag things whereas with bookmarks there’s a one to one relationship between a bookmark and the folder it’s filed under.
June 19th, 2006 at 4:49 am
I definitely think you’re not alone Mike, but I do get a lot of value out of using del.icio.us.
First, you can get the thrill by having a link you submit end up on the delicious popular page, which is the equivalent of reaching the Digg or Newsvine front page. (Maybe not quite the same traffic spike as Digg, but a similar thrill).
Additionally, the reason I use it personally for bookmarking is to keep a lot of links that I normally wouldn’t bookmark on my computer itself. Things that I might be marginally interested in, or links about a particular topic I’m researching for a short time but don’t want cluttering up my bookmarks for the long term. I don’t like the chore of keeping my local bookmarks clean, so delicious allows me to save and tag a lot of things and I never have to do the maintenance. If I ever want to find it again, I can find it via my tags.
I also do have three close friends how use it, so we use the network feature (the for:username tag) to share links with each other. Sure, email works about as well, but it’s easier to save and track this way.
June 19th, 2006 at 4:59 am
The idea of getting a reward for bookmarking something strikes me as pretty bizarre to be honest. I bookmark stuff on del.icio.us because it’s useful to me, simple as that. It’s centrally stored, taggable, searchable, and I can find other people with similar interests (and hence more stuff I might like to read or what have you) very easily. Digg has all this useless cruft–such as the horrible comments and general popularity-contest feel of the place–on top of the core features that del.icio.us does so well.
June 19th, 2006 at 5:10 am
I use del.icio.us, but anti-socially - I don’t bother to make bookmarks private, but the social aspect is of no value to me.
I use it because I need a searchable, taggable repository for bookmarks that works from my desktop, my laptop, other people’s computers, and so on.
June 19th, 2006 at 5:21 am
Mike, I think the biggest benefit of del.icio.us is that you can access your bookmarks from different places (work - home). I don’t use del.icio.us in any social way, it’s _just_ a storage for my bookmarks.
As for the benefit of users, I don’t know if it means much to people but your bookmark can reach the del.ici.us/popular page. That’s the reward, I guess.
June 19th, 2006 at 6:15 am
I guess it all comes down to how you like your archived websites organized, and how you want to access them. I hate making category hierarchies unless they’re absolutely necessary — I think tagging is much more intuitive.
I also don’t use del.icio.us for social or link sharing purposes; it’s strictly for my own benefit and reference. I can access it from anywhere, on any computer, in seconds, which is handy for giving a friend that research article you were talking about in the car on the way to their house, or the online store for that designer that makes the sweet looking t-shirts.
It’s also just as fast as browser bookmarking: command+1 in Safari gives me a javascript del.icio.us add popup for the current page. And there’s an ‘add to del.icio.us’ option in the right-click menu in NetNewsWire, so I get a unified bookmarking experience across all my browsing programs.
June 19th, 2006 at 6:18 am
When I first found out about sites like ma.gnolia and Del.icio.us I thought they were really cool ideas, so I tried registering for them. And although I’ve been able to find cool stuff from those sites, I never took the time out of my browsing to go back and use the sites for myself and add bookmarks. I agree in saying that they served no real purpose for me. I would just link the sites from my site.
June 19th, 2006 at 7:35 am
I guess my main reasons for using bookmarking sites is three fold. First, my bookmarks are online, not just on one computer. I can access them from any computer in the world with an internet connection. Second, as a backup. If my laptop crashes(not that it would as it’s a Mac, right?) or anything goes wrong I have them all backed up online. Third, it is really easy to share them.
I use Ma.gnolia and have convinced several of my friends to switch or start too. One of the coolest things they do is store a local backup of the site when you bookmark it. This means if the site goes away, you can still see your bookmark. Just a few thoughts.
June 19th, 2006 at 7:38 am
I use ma.gnolia to bookmark those “one day, some day” links and bloglines for all my RSS feeds.
The only benefit is that I always always forget to backup my bookmarks and I use like 3 different computers.
June 19th, 2006 at 7:40 am
I use del.icio.us because if I saved everything I found interesting in my Bookmarks it would be a total mess. I’ve seen my mum’s bookmarks after 8 years online and it makes my head spin. With these habits, tagging and sorting by date are essential.
June 19th, 2006 at 7:40 am
Rundle, actually del.icio.us *does* give you some credit. It has a (small, though) little label saying “First posted by johndoe”. That’s a bit of reward, isn’t it?
June 19th, 2006 at 8:33 am
Del.icio.us is about distribution, sharing content by equity from singularity and serendipity.
Digg is about distribution, sharing content by competition and selection from masses.
It’s not a ethical problem, it’s just a different perspective.
I do use Delicious/populicious and not digg, for example. I don’t believe in the trends of the masses. I believe in the trends of the singles (quality singles). More affordable, more innovative, less conformist.
June 19th, 2006 at 8:40 am
The social aspect of the services you mentioned doesn’t do much for me either. The value I find from those services is about discoverability and searchability of the bookmarks you create. It’s all fine and dandy to locally bookmark the sites you truly find interesting, but what about the millions of other articles you stumble across each day that you don’t have time for? It’s much easier to tag and slap a description on a URL for later than to organize everything into folders. Most local bookmarking systems aren’t built well enough to handle random bits of information without an elaborate organization scheme.
June 19th, 2006 at 8:45 am
I do. I use del.icio.us. I’ve found it great to be able to access my bookmarks on my mac at home and my pc at work, and the ability to search them is great too. Using a browser link to post makes it quick and painless: click post, click or type a few tags, click save, and you’re back where you were.
Aside from having traditional bookmarks stuck on one computer (of course there are options around that as well), it also alleviates the need to really give any thought to organizing them *at the time* that I’m adding the bookmark. I don’t have to think about what folder they should go in, how I’ll find them again, or if I’ll ever use it again.
And I also display them on my blog’s sidebar.
June 19th, 2006 at 9:11 am
I find social bookmarking sites extremely helpful because I work from 4 different machines on a daily basis. I don’t necessarily use them for the social aspect, I just like the convenience of a central location for easy access.
June 19th, 2006 at 9:18 am
I like the fact that I can send my little brother to http://del.icio.us/benjackson/career when he’s looking for a job instead of digging through a list of bookmarks to draw up a list.
I also find that tagging makes it a hell of a lot easier to find obscure resources that I bookmarked a while back.
June 19th, 2006 at 9:19 am
I don’t use social bookmarking sites for the “social” part at all. I use it because I like being able to have access to my bookmarks from any computer and “tagging” as a way of organization makes more sense to me than a folder hierarchy.
June 19th, 2006 at 9:22 am
I’m the same: unsocial. I figure that i have so little time that I can’t waste it looking at what other people bookmark. Besides, how can I aspire to be original if all I look at are other people’s choices.
I do use a social bookmarking engine (Scuttle), but it’s only so I can have access to my bookmarks from my many computers, not to share with the world and shout out what I look at. I don’t think other people care what I bookmark, the same way I don’t care what they bookmark.
June 19th, 2006 at 9:26 am
I guess I don’t really buy into it all (for me personally). It is the same with RSS for me. I have recently tried netvibes.com and it is very nice. However, its so much easier for me to just add/manage my bookmarks within Safari - as well as a specific bookmark folder for my RSS feeds - organized how I like them with the ability to color/sort them on specific criteria. Netvibes.com doesnt do this for me.
Overall, I guess I just dont trust the websites. There are a flux of ‘web 2.0′ sites that will be gone tomorrow. Why would I spend my time trying to transfer everything into a website when my computer does it just fine.
Though I frequently visit digg.com/slashdot.com - I dont actively submit links/comments to either. Maybe I should jump in on this for the thrill :)
Same thing with flickr. I dont use that because I have iPhoto to manage all of my photos. If I have a few select/gallery that I want to show to the world I will upload them on my site. I would rather do the work in my local OS than depend on a website.
So - in short. No I do not use the social bookmarking apps.
June 19th, 2006 at 9:35 am
For me the value is del.icio.us is that it’s a genuinely useful tool.
At home I have a Mac and at the office I have no choice but to to work on a PC, sharing bookmarks between the two is difficult and clumsy, and del.icio.us, or any of it’s competitors, picks up the slack and makes sharing bookmarks between the two so easy.
June 19th, 2006 at 9:35 am
I think it boils down to the fact that I’m on my main computer all day long, no switching. I can absolutely see the benefit when you’re switching between work and home and stuff, so I think that’s main benefit I’m missing out on.
I think it’s odd though that there are so many bookmarking sites. Just like with social networks, if all your friends are already using one (del.icio.us) then you’re probably going to stick with that. All these copycats that add 1 or 2 semi-useful features should probably be falling away soon I imagine.
June 19th, 2006 at 9:38 am
I use del.icio.us, but not necessarily for the social aspect. As a matter of fact, I rarely access my del.icio.us bookmarks as if they were “bookmarks.”
For me, del.icio.us is a nice way to leave a bread crumb trail of where I’ve been. It’s a historic record of what I thought was cool, and why I thought so. I can then syndicate this if others might be interested. For example, if others I work with are interested in keeping up with tech news, but don’t have the time to keep up on their own - the feed to my del.icio.us bookmarks might contain just what they’re looking for.
June 19th, 2006 at 9:55 am
I am with you on social bookmarking - I have never used one myself even though my site offers them to visitors.
Of course it is a matter of personal preference. del.icio.us seems confusing to me, the whole tag thing seems messy (granted I have not spent much time trying to figure things out.)
My own personal bookmarks on my computer are getting very cluttered and I do need to either organize them soon or use some type of social bookmark service. Having something available over the web certainly has its advantages. If I were bookmarking over the web, I would prefer them to be my own persoanl bookmarks as opposed to open social bookmarks.
June 19th, 2006 at 10:15 am
I use Del.icio.us to build linkrolls in my sidebar. Bloglines lets me do it with sites that have RSS feeds, but sometimes I like to link to “non-bloggy” sites that wouldn’t normally think of setting up RSS feeds.
June 19th, 2006 at 11:03 am
I don’t bookmark socially, but I do use del.icio.us to keep my bookmarks in a central place. Nothing worse than bookmarking something at work and not having it when I get home.
June 19th, 2006 at 11:24 am
I use del.icio.us for really one reason, it lets me access my bookmarks from where ever. It comes in handy whenever I find an interesting site while at work via a blog so I can check it out when I get home.
Also, I like the tagging method rather than using folders for everything. If I used only one computer, and I could bookmark sites using the same method as del.icio.us, then I’d have no use for it.
Saying that, I could care less about the social element added to del.icio.us. Once in a blue moon will I search del.icio.us for what other people have bookmarked.
I guess I’m one of the few people that doesn’t really like digg. People rave so much about it and I forced myself to use it in two intances for about a week.
Under the design topic, it’s mostly crap to me. Stuff I’ve already seen or something I’d never use. But that’s me, apparently its useful to many other people.
June 19th, 2006 at 11:46 am
Social bookmarking has 5 main purposes for me:
1. Share bookmarks between work and home
2. Save things that I might need later but probably won’t look at for a long time.
3. Populate the link roll on my blog.
4. Using my inbox to see what interesting sites other people are bookmarking.
5. A place where friends & family can share some of the things I’ve been checking out.
June 19th, 2006 at 1:16 pm
I think it actually depends on how we use it. I use del.icio.us because i don’t need the frills and thrills associated with digg.com or newsvine. I just need a place for me to store all my bookmarks so i can access it anywhere with a PC.
But you can tell me that the other services offers similar features and it’s up to us to make use of these extra functions next time.
Heh, but in this particular case of social bookmarking, i just can’t be bother with the community aspect when so many other things are grabbing our attention nowadays. :)
June 19th, 2006 at 1:17 pm
I actually signed up at del.icio.us right at the very beginning, but after bookmarking a few sites I pretty much forgot about it. Later I realized that it would be really useful for things like reference links and started using it for things like coding references. Then much more recently I actually discovered how useful the social aspect of it can be. Part of how I pass the time at work is exchanging links to funny, interesting, and cool articles, blogs, videos, &c with friends over IM. When my friends are busy and not online, I often found myself leaving a browser window open full of tabs for all the links I planned on sending when they got online. This was pretty annoying and messed with my window management, until I realized that this was exactly what social bookmarking is for. Now I just del.icio.us the sites and tag them with the names of the friends I want to ’send’ them to (or use the for: syntax if they actually have a del.icio.us account). It creates a custom RSS feed for each of my friends so they can easily see (and save) the links I think they’ll be interested in. I now have over 350 links bookmarked with del.icio.us.
June 19th, 2006 at 1:31 pm
If you are having problems with 2 or more Firefoxes, give Google’s browser sync a try. I use it, it comes pretty handy at times.
June 19th, 2006 at 2:22 pm
The fact remains that no matter how much you want the bookmarks to be social, what people really want is their own bookmarks easily accessible online from anywhere, and easily tagged, categorized and searched. Only one system has all of these nailed cold with no ads and no spam, with everything under the sun from import, export to maintaining your current folder structure, removing duplicates, removing broken links, tags, searches, you name it. That system is http://www.Netvouz.com I know many of you have never heard of it, but del.ico.us is only famous because of its press not because it actually works good. Check out the review below or sign up yourself and import your bookmarks from Explorer, from Firefox, from Safari, or even from del-icio.us or Powermarks. The transition will be seemless and you’ll never go back to any of the other overated, unspectacular sites again.
http://3spots.blogspot.com/2006/01/netvouz-complete.html
June 19th, 2006 at 3:15 pm
I use del.icio.us but I cant really get into it for some reason. I cant really understand what I get out of it. I mean if I like a site or a story I just bookmark it for future use. I guess I am not thinking of others.
June 19th, 2006 at 10:11 pm
I’m in grad school right now and one of my profs tags his del.icio.us bookmarks with the course name. I wish they all did that. It is a useful way to share a list of helpful sites with the entire class in a dynamic, easily accessible manner.
June 20th, 2006 at 12:10 pm
I use del.icio.us quite a bit. I even blogged about several ways I use it.
I agree that bookmarking on your computer provides most of the features. But del.icio.us does something more. It lets you set up a network and while bookmarking a site, I also add it to some of the members in my network (there are just a couple of them now). This saves me just sending an email to let my friend/family member to share the site.
I think the tags are the most powerful things in del.icio.us. I go to the site once in a while, look at popular tags as well as specific tags to find what others have bookmarked.
http://dorai.wordpress.com/2006/02/01/seven-ways-i-use-delicious/
June 26th, 2006 at 11:57 pm
I use del.icio.us quite a bit. I even blogged about several ways I use it.
I agree that bookmarking on your computer provides most of the features. But del.icio.us does something more. It lets you set up a network and while bookmarking a site, I also add it to some of the members in my network (there are just a couple of them now). This saves me just sending an email to let my friend/family member to share the site.
I think the tags are the most powerful things in del.icio.us. I go to the site once in a while, look at popular tags as well as specific tags to find what others have bookmarked.
http://dorai.wordpress.com/2006/02/01/seven-ways-i-use-delicious/
June 27th, 2006 at 12:00 am
I’ve found that, while few of my friends use del.icio.us, many use RSS feed readers… and I have been using del.icio.us to send targeted links to them through that.
I send a certain group an RSS feed for a certain topic - say rock climbing - and as I find links, I pass them along.
The old way was e-mailing links to various groups of people… which was messy and kind of intrusive. I just found this a bit more efficient.
July 3rd, 2006 at 5:38 pm
Add Your Comment
Comments are moderated because spam's not tolerated.
