Marky Mark

I've come to realize that there are a ton of bookmarking websites. Just mind boggling. I'll name a few of the services out there.

Furl, Simpy, Ma.gnolia, Blinklist, Markaboo, Spurl. And of course, the original, del.icio.us.

Let me explain what a bookmarking site is all about. Every browser allows you to bookmark websites, so you don't forget just in case you want to go back and check it out later on. Here's the problem. You're on your friend's laptop or at some public kiosk, and you don't have your bookmarks.

Wouldn't it be nice to be able to access them? It sure would. Maybe a company, like Google, could do that for you. The first major company to do this was del.icio.us and for a while, no one was competing. But now, they're everywhere.

Once you have your bookmarks up, and your friends have them up, then, well, that's a lot of bookmarks. If you keep a lot of bookmarks, you might actually placing them in folders. This can serve as a form of tagging.

Tagging is all the rage, don't you know? It's the simple act of adding keywords to the bookmarks. For example, you might see some clever piece of Java code to do sorting, so you might add the tags: Java, sort, clever.

Then, if you forget the link, you can search by tags.

But wait, it gets better than that. If many people use the same tags as you do, then you can check out other people's bookmarks.

This is what bookmarking websites do.

Here's a problem. You have a bunch on your browser. How do you get them from your browser and uploaded to your bookmark account? All browsers allow you to export bookmarks to a file. You upload this file to your bookmark account and voila, you're good to go.

But how do you add new bookmarks? You can't use your browser to just say "Add bookmark" because it adds it to your browser's bookmarks, not to your account.

The solution? Most bookmark sites have "bookmarklets". You drag that to your bookmark bar. When you're on a webpage you want to book mark, you click the button.

Most sites do the following. You are sent to a bookmark webpage with some information partially filled out. You fill in some tags, submit, and it returns you back to the page you were looking at.

However, this annoying because it causes your list of traversed links to include the bookmarking site. Thus, some bookmarking sites have popups, so you can (presumably) fill out the information without leaving the current webpage.

Some bookmarking sites do more. Most allow you to search your bookmarks. The one feature most bookmarking sites have that the original del.icio.us doesn't is private bookmarking. By default, all bookmarks in del.icio.us are readable by anyone (though they'd have to look for you). Almost all competitors allow you to hide yours.

A more obscure feature is exporting bookmarks. I was using Blinklist because it was the first I came across. It runs fast enough for my purposes (Michael Arrington of TechCrunch raved about Markaboo--so I got that, but it ran like a dog for days afterwards, taking 10-15 seconds to send in an update. It also has no obvious way to export stuff. I could go on and on about why Markaboo is not that great at this moment.)

However, some bookmarking sites are evil. They want you to easily import your bookmarks from a browser or del.icio.us, but they're not prepared to make it easy for you to export it and try some other bookmarking service. One guy left Blinklist for exactly this reason. It's not that Blinklist doesn't allow exporting, but they don't do it in convenient formats. This guy went to Simpy.

Simpy is a bit ugly, but has many options for importing and exporting.

Many bookmarking sites have other features, like the ability to save notes and sometimes even upload files.

Here's the impression I get from reading stuff. First, TechCrunch loves Markaboo. Blinklist is pretty popular, using a Digg-like format to blink sites. The idea is that people "vote" for sites (mainly, I assume by having it saved as a bookmark). I like its look, its speed, but it's annoying that it doesn't allow a variety of export mechanisms to get you out of their system. (But then, why doesn't del.icio.us simply make private bookmarks? I mean, come on. Everyone else is doing it).

Ma.gnolia looks good, but man, it's tough to remember where to put that d*** period. Someone has remarked it uses up a ton of real estate per link, even if it looks good.

Spurl appears to let you use a sidebar to examine your bookmarks. They're from Iceland. That's a pretty clever idea as that's how I currently use my bookmark. Some sites also allow for integrating del.icio.us
bookmarks everytime you click a special button.

This is a crowded space.

Let me end by telling you what I want in a bookmarking site.

Private and public bookmarks. Tag folders that hold bookmarks. A pop-up "bookmark" this. The ability to import and export in a variety of formats. An API to program against. Some place to send email and suggestions to (and someone that responds). An easy to use interface (Simpy's looks like a mess). Some nice Web 2.0 features (I can't zap multiple bookmarks easily). I want many bookmarks per page (like 25).

Yeah, you can use tag clouds, have some recommended bookmarks, have suggested tag names that I should use. Also, have a calendar view letting me know when I added which bookmark. Be able to see the bookmarks added in most-recent order.

And it needs to be fast.

So far, I haven't hit a site that does all of this. I'll take some better notes and give an update at some point.