Social Bookmarking - My New Google

Social Bookmarking is a new term for me. I am still trying to figure out what all I will use these pages for and which one(s) I will choose. First, there are so many from which to choose that making that decision is difficult. They all seem to be too similar to make any distinction besides a few minor functionality differences. Second, it seems a little creepy that other people can be spying on my surfing and saving of pages, I know I can make my bookmarks private, but will I remember to click that little button? And third, since this is still a fairly new concept to me, I think the full functionality of is still to be seen.

My first impressions on their usefulness are optimistic though. At their base, the first and foremost reason that anyone would want to use one of these sites is to be able to access your “Favorites” from any computer.

Social bookmarking is the way to solve several problems that can arise from keeping your “Favorites” on just one computer. Have you ever been at a friends’ house and wanted to show them a new site you had found or an article you had come across, but couldn’t remember where it was? Have you ever had a computer crash and were not able to retrieve all of your data, namely your “Favorites”? (If this hasn’t happened to you, beware, it probably will someday.) Have you worked on a project or paper that required doing research online? You probably browsed a million sites, but didn’t want to mark them all as your favorites. Or have you been at a friends house, surfing and found a site you really like? Social bookmarking is a way to store all of these sites, without having to remember what they are, write them down, or have a drop down list a mile long.

Another use for these sites is research. When you Google a topic, you are at the mercy of Google’s random search abilities or the price tag of a company’s desire to be placed at the top of a search list. With these social bookmarking sites, you can do a search, the same as you would with Google, but you get the wisdom of the membership base, versus the revenue generator that Google uses to push companies to the top of the search list.

The “Perfect Match” exercise wasn’t really for us to find some random person for the sake of finding our “Perfect Match”, but rather a way to help with researching a topic or finding someone with similar interests. By utilizing the tag clouds of people with similar interests, you can use them to help you do your searching on topics of interest that they share. When you find that “Perfect Match”, it is sort of like having someone else do your research for you.

Even if you aren’t doing research, if you find someone with similar interests, you can use them as a filter for articles you might be interested in or sites you may want to check out. It’s like having a friend tell you about a great new site they found, except that you really don't know the friend, just their tag cloud.

The biggest decision I have now is which one do I choose? In reading the article by Michael Pick and comparing the sites, I have at least narrowed it down to 2 (delicious.com and digg,com) with a standby backup (stumbleupon.com) if neither of these suits my taste.

I think the distinction, between the first two at least, is that I will use one for work, school, and research (delicious.com) and use the other for more personal things (digg.com) and if I feel like randomly (sort of) searching for articles, then I’ll try my luck with stumbleupon.com.