Is Social Bookmarking Dead?
Last week, Delicious launched its much-hyped "2.0" release. But rather than making a splash, there seemed to be a dull thud. Certainly, there were many people excited about the makeover to the most popular social bookmarking website, but others like John Furrier and Mathew Ingram took a more "so what?" approach to the launch.
I have to admit, I have always used sites like Delicious as social bookmarking sites rather than social bookmarking sites. Like Mathew, I find that I often don't go back to the sites I bookmark. So I use social bookmarking to store stuff like Together as One by DJ Earworm -- a link I might want access when over at a friend's house. In other words, something interesting, but not something I would necessarily go back to myself.
Is Social Bookmarking Dead? When you compare Digg (about 22.5 million unique visits a month) to Delicious (about 1.5 million unique visits a month), it certainly seems as if social bookmarking is dead and social news is the new king.
What do you think?
Comments
Daniel,
I enjoy your column on a regular basis. I don’t think social bookmarking is dead, but I do think it has perhaps moved beyond the service Delicious provides. I have over 1700 bookmarks stored there, but for the past 4 months or so, I’ve been using Diigo as my preferred tool. It has more bookmarking tools (echoing to Twitter), is more social (groups and discussions), and supports collaborative webpage annotation. Plus, it leverages Delicious with the capability to mirror all bookmark additions and edits to your Delicious account. My Delicious account is still current, but I use Diigo as the front end. I think there are many users doing the same which may account for the lack of attention to the Delicious “upgrade.”
-cmd
Delicious could certainly use a few more features to interact with other social websites, but I think that is a thin line to walk between just enough — and not too busy of an interface — and too much — which leads to a confusing, cluttered interface.
I’d say that sites like Diigo have taken away some of the elite users, and popular new sites like Clipmarks has grabbed some of the new users.
Hi Daniel,
Microsoft does not think social bookmarking is dead - just in need of a solid scenario. We are about to launch v 1.0 of social bookmarking for MSDN and TechNet which will allow devs and IT pros to share valuable technical content, find and connect with each other, and easily publish their favorites to Microsoft sites as “social feeds.” Check out my v 1.0 Preview blog post at: http://blogs.technet.com/johmar/default.aspx