Is Social Bookmarking the Search Engine of the Future?
So it wasn’t until a couple months ago, that I began to hear about the whole concept of “Social Bookmarking”. I’ve even mentioned it to a couple of my friends, and they always pose the question “what ARE you talking about?”
Even though I understand how social bookmarking works now (well, not completely, but learning), I tend to still say “hu?”. Social bookmarking is a web-based service, where shared lists of user-created Internet bookmarks are displayed. These sites generally organize their content using tags (a keyword or term to classify content). Social bookmarking sites are an increasingly popular way to locate, classify, rank, and share Internet resources through the practice of tagging and inferences drawn from grouping and analysis of tags. But HOW do they make money?
What is Social Bookmarking?
A popular social bookmarking site - del.icio.us - describes social bookmarking like this (don’t get me started on how lame I think their name is):
What is social bookmarking?
del.icio.us is a social bookmarking website, which means it is designed to allow you to store and share bookmarks on the web, instead of inside your browser. This has several advantages.
First, you can get to your bookmarks from anywhere, no matter whether you’re at home, at work, in a library, or on a friend’s computer.
Second, you can share your bookmarks publicly, so your friends, coworkers, and other people can view them for reference, amusement, collaboration, or anything else. (Note that you can also mark bookmarks on del.icio.us as private — only viewable by you — if you like.)
Third, you can find other people on del.icio.us who have interesting bookmarks and add their links to your own collection. Everyone on del.icio.us chooses to save their bookmarks for a reason. You have access to the links that everyone wants to remember. You can see whether two people have chosen to remember a link, or whether it was useful enough for a thousand people to remember — which may help you find things that are useful for you, too.
So I ask again, HOW does it make money? (in fact, according to Wikipedia, there were several social bookmarking services that failed back when the dot-com bubble burst)
Perhaps there are people out there who think that social bookmarking will replace the seach engine. It almost seems to make sense, noting that PEOPLE are running the show rather than some metric that Google changes from month to month. But did you know that Yahoo bought del.icio.us? Yes, nearly a year ago. And they just integrated its technology into their Yahoo Toolbar.
If you’re interested in learning a little more, here’s a good article written by Dave Taylor on What’s cool about del.icio.us.
WHO is the Social Bookmark Leader?
So what made me want to blog about this subject in the first place? Well, I knew about de.licious, and digg.com, but what I didn’t know, is how big the world of social bookmarking was, until I saw this on a blogger’s web page:
Does this not seem crazy? If you don’t know what this image represents - each icon represents a social bookmarking company/website you can link the particular blog article that appears above these icons. Included are:
(taking a deep breath here)
And that’s just the ones this blogger included on his list. There’s also Backflip, BlogMemes, Connotea, Feedmarker, Gravee, Lilisto, Spurl, Buddymakrs, Hyperlinkomatic, Linkagogo, maple, Raw Sugar, Segnalo, unalog, zurpy, CiteUlike, de.lirio.us, igooi, Linkroll, MesFavs, tagtooga, Wink, Complore, Give a Link, kinja, looklater, Tailrank, and wists to name a few.
Sure all these have their differences, but does this look AT ALL familiar to the dot-com days? Remember when everyone had their “favorite search engine”? How many of those are left? How many of them survived their VC funding being cut off? I guess only time will tell what’s next for social bookmarking - you can bet I’ll be watching.