Social Bookmark Managers Part 3 - PeopleBait: Practical Internet Marketing Advice for 2006

20|Social Bookmark Managers Part 3

February 28th, 2006 by Marcel Ursprung

Del.icio.us

http://del.icio.us/
The most popular social bookmark tool is most definitely del.icio.us. It now has over 50,000 users, and it all started as a personal project for Joshua Schachter. Before he put it online to share with friends it was just a simple link list with annotated notes. Due to its large user base del.icio.us is a great example of Folksonomy at work. All bookmarks are considered public, no private feature, although you can disguise who posted it by using this hack. It’s popularity has spawned loads of plugins and services that connect to and interface with del.icio.us, even a firefox extension. The interface is clean and easy to use. It has the standard export and import features, RSS feed of any page and multiple tag view settings. But ultimately it’s the community and link tags that make del.icio.us so sweet.

Spurl

http://www.spurl.net
Spurl (SPecial URL) was developed by Hjalmar Gislason. It was first released to the public in Feb. 2004 by Spurl ehf., an Icelandic based company. It currently has several thousands of active members. Just like Furl, Spurl saves a local copy of the url and allows full text searching. It also supports multi-level categories and tags, which can be searched by Zniff, a full featured search engine, using human information for ranking and indexing. Spurl supports both private and public bookmarks and has support for RSS 2.0, Atom and a Javascript syndicator. When a url is bookmarked by a Spurl user a screen shot thumbnail of the site is saved, which is used for it’s wayback machine like url cache viewer. The interface is clean and very intuitive, finding links form other users is easy when you use the built in discovery module. Some bonus features are the unique bookmark toolbar for your browser, option for automatically posting to del.icio.us, and it has a developer API in PHP. Based on it’s active user community the future looks great for Spurl users.

Simpy

http://www.simpy.com/
Simpy was authored by Otis Gospodnetić with it’s first release in May 2004. The service was first created for organizing links, the social aspect grew out of that. With Simpy you can track other users’ bookmarks by creating topics based on users, these topics can then be made available as RSS feeds. Simpy also allows users to create private notes, which can be tagged just like bookmarks. Simpy is still in it’s infancy with a relatively small user base, although it has many great features, the user interface feels cluttered and not very friendly, this might be the dominant factor for it’s slow growth. It supports access groups so you can share links with a select group of users. For developers there is a REST-based API, and a discussion list.

Connotea

http://www.connotea.org/
Connotea by the Nature Publishing Group, with Ben Lund as project lead, was released few days before Christmas 2004. It’s user base is still rather small but growing steadily. It’s positioned as a scientific del.icio.us, equipped to function as a citation manager. It currently supports extraction of metadata from a number of sites including PubMed, HubMed, Amazon.com, Nature.com, and D-Lib Magazine. I found the interface to be simple looking but much more confusing to use. It support a broad range of features from export, RSS syndication and private bookmarks. This will be a service to keep tabs on, add a bookmark to it.

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