While emailing and chatting with your friends and family, have you ever shared a website link that you thought they might find interesting? If so, then you have participated in social bookmarking.

Today I am going to explain to you why social bookmarking is great.

You might have heard of the more popular bookmarking sites like Del.icio.us, Digg and Stumbleupon, but maybe you have not tried them out yet. Let me clarify the concept of shared bookmarking:

Brief history of social bookmarking

“The concept of shared online bookmarks dates back to April 1996 with the launch of itList.com. Within the next three years, online bookmark services became competitive, with venture-backed companies like Backflip, Blink, Clip2, Hotlinks, Quiver, and others entering the market. Lacking viable models for making money, this early generation of social bookmarking companies failed as the dot-com bubble burst.”[Wikipedia.com]

Definitions of social bookmarking

Social bookmarking is the “art of saving bookmarks to a public website and then tagging them.” In other words, social bookmarking is a term for allowing people to publish, categorize and share their bookmarks to other websites. “With the help of metadata, users can store, organize, search and manage bookmarks of web pages on the internet.” There are many ways to define this concept. Now let’s take a look at who is using social bookmarking and the details of how it works.

What is social bookmarking?

When I come across a website that I want to view later, I save the address of that website on my computer so I can easily access it later. That is called bookmarking. If I stored the bookmark on a social media site and assigned it tags, that would be called social bookmarking.

How do I start social bookmarking?

First, get registered on any social bookmarking website – digg, del.icio.us, stumbleupon – then you will be able to store, tag and share your bookmarks. Tagging makes it easy to delegate individual bookmarks as private or public. New visitors to most of these sites have access to the public area, and they can find users’ bookmarks by searching keywords, tags and other classification schemes.

How does it all work?

“Social Bookmarking opens the door to new ways of organizing information and categorizing resources. The creator of a bookmark assigns tags to each resource, resulting in a user-directed, “amateur” method of classifying information. Because social bookmarking services indicate who created each bookmark and provide access to that person’s other bookmarked resources, users can easily make social connections with other individuals interested in just about any topic. Users can also see how many people have used a tag and search for all resources that have been assigned that tag. In this way, the community of users over time will develop a unique structure of keywords to define resources something that has come to be known as a ‘folksonomy.’”

Here is a video that will further explain the concept of social bookmarking:

Who started social bookmarking sites?

“Founded in late 2003, del.icio.us pioneered tagging and coined the term “social bookmarking”. In 2004, as del.icio.us began to take off, Citeulike, Connotea (focusing on social bookmarking for scientists), Simpy, Furl, and Stumbleupon were released, and Netvouz in 2005. In 2006, Ma.gnolia and Diigo also entered the bookmarking field. Sites such as Digg, reddit, and Newsvine are a related type of web service that provides a system for social news. In 2006, Connectbeam was the first company to launch a social bookmarking application squarely focused at businesses and enterprises, and continues to innovate in this direction. In 2007, IBM announced plans to enter the social software market, and the BBC web site added social bookmarking links for its news and sport articles, as many other news websites had done earlier.”

A look at the main social bookmarking sites

Del.icio.us: It all seems to have started with Del.icio.us - the oldest, most popular and most populated social bookmarking site. So far, Del.icio.us is king of the game.

The primary use of del.icio.us is to store your bookmarks online, which allows you to access the same bookmarks from any computer and add bookmarks from anywhere. On del.icio.us, you can use tags to organize and remember your bookmarks, which is a much more flexible system than folders. Delicious is enriched with beautiful API (Application Programming Interface), but their front page is not so special as it is full of several URL’s, and their “import” feature stifles when you tried to import very heavy file full of URLs. There are several sites that basically just clone delicious and try to improve it in subtle ways.

“The Delicious service (no longer “del.icio.us” and now residing at delicious.com) boasts 3 million registered users and 100 million unique URLs bookmarked. The site was founded by Joshua Schachter in late 2003 and acquired by Yahoo! in 2005.”

Stumbleupon: This popular site helps users discover and share great websites. They deliver high-quality pages matched to the users’ personal preferences. Users are able to rate sites they like, which automatically shares them with friends and other users with similar tastes.

People who are passionate about StumbleUpon say they like it because of the surprise factor in what they see next, and the fact that the product has such a high hit rate in delivering interesting new content.

StumbleUpon says they have nearly 5.5 million users as of July 1st, 2008, up from 1.7 million in December 2006. Over 10 million personalized recommendations (“stumbles”) are delivered daily.

StumbleUpon was acquired by Ebay in May 2007, and continues to operate as an independent subsidiary based in San Francisco.

Digg: Digg is a place for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the web. From the biggest online destinations to the most obscure blog, Digg surfaces the best stuff as voted on by users. Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson’s Digg.com is among the top 100 sites on the web in any category according to Amazon’s Alexa metrics. Its unique approach to community driven news and dedication to tech trends and product announcements attracts IT professionals, developers, professional geeks and other tech leaders. Digg’s enormous ability to drive channel traffic to other websites has become so well known that when other sites experience an exceptional surge in daily traffic.

Digg continues to grow, claiming 20 million visitors per month and an increasing amount of mainstream attention.

Mixx: Chris McGill, formerly the General Manager of Yahoo News and more recently the VP Strategy at USA Today is the founder of another 2007 social news site called Mixx. To put it into context, it’s a sort of cross between Digg, LinkedIn and MyYahoo. In a nutshell, it’s a social network that lets you find and share news based on your interests and location. Mixx.com is a social news site that seems to have everything going for it. It’s got more and better features than Digg, it’s been integrated into the websites of a healthy list of huge mainstream media properties and, for the developers out there, it’s got one of the most interesting APIs available today.

Mixx has a quickly growing membership base of 500,000 registered users.

Reddit: This site was founded by Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian in 2005, then 22-year-old graduates of the University of Virginia. It received its initial funding from Y Combinator. The team expanded to include Christopher Slowe and Aaron Swartz in 2005. Aaron Swartz joined in late January 2006 as part of the company’s merger with Swartz’s Infogami. The combined company was known as “not a bug”. Condé Nast Publications, owner of Wired, acquired not a bug on 31 October 2006.

Reddit was named by Ohanian while browsing the University of Virginia’s Alderman Library. It is short for “read it”, and is generally pronounced in the past tense, as in “I have read it.”

Registered users appears to be undisclosed. Reddit representative has said that the site gets tens of thousands of users every day. A Google search for http://reddit.com/user gets 209,000 results.

References:

1. http://seoconnection.blogspot.com/2008/07/social-bookmarking-for-blogs.html
2. http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ELI7001.pdf
3. http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/09/06/exclusive-screen-shots-and-feature-overview-of-delicious-20-preview/
4. http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/11/03/top-digg-users-feeling-snubbed/
5. http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/05/cnncom-adds-mixx-to-its-mix-of-bookmarking-buttons/
6. http://www.crunchbase.com/company/mixx
7. http://socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/2006/05/30/four-memediggers-compared-digg-reddit-meneame-and-hugg/
8. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reddit#History

Bookmark It

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