Making Sense of Social Bookmarking Offerings – del.icio.us vs. BlinkList
Yesterday evening Mike (Thanks, Mike, and welcome to elsua!), one of the folks behind BlinkList, shared over at Web Links and Thoughts To Revisit the following comment that I thought was worth while a reply to on a separate weblog post to provide some further insights:
“Why use so many social bookmarking services and what prevents you from just going with BlinkList?”
So here we go with that reply. Yesterday I commented how I am eventually making use of some of the different social bookmarking offerings that are out there and after reading Mike’s comment I feel I perhaps need to expand further a bit on what I really mean with “making use of”. In principle, I am making extensive use of del.icio.us to store all of my online bookmarks for the simple fact of its extensibility that allows me to export the contents of the different bookmarks elsewhere, or import them into other tools or offerings, one of them being our own IBM social bookmarking internal offering, which I have weblogged about not so long ago. So the fact that I can have both my Intranet and Internet bookmarks in a single repository, in this case, our internal offering, by putting together both that tool and del.icio.us bookmarks is a big plus to me. No other tool that I know of provides that integration. At least, not yet.
Then the fact that del.icio.us seems to integrate quite nicely as well with Opera, my default web browser, is also another big plus that I have enjoyed from the very beginning. I know that other tools and offerings are very tightly integrated into making good use of FireFox but the fact that they are only supporting that particular browser is not something that I find quite comforting as it would make you quite dependable on it. And right now FireFox is quite far from being my default browser as can be read all over the place here in my weblog. If anything, I can only see Flock taking that job once it becomes a bit more stable, but I will weblog about that later on. This browser support restriction is one of the main issues that I see that prevent me from using BlinkList much more extensively. I know that there is a bookmarklet that I could use (And I already have it up and running) but what I am talking about more is the possibility of importing my Opera bookmarks, a feature that, for the time being has not been added, as far as I can see. If BlinkList would add that functionality next to importing del.icio.us and Furl bookmarks it would certainly have a much stronger case for me to try it out. So we shall see how that goes.
With all that said, though, it has been quite some time since I last tried BlinkList, so triggered by Mike’s comment yesterday, I decided to take it for another spin and see how much it changed from the last time that I made extensive use of it, and that not just related to subscribing to the RSS Newsfeed. So far I am enjoying the experience quite a lot I must admit. So I may eventually give it a try further as soon as I could figure out how I can get the BlinkList bookmarks exported into del.icio.us so that I can then make use of them through my IBM internal social bookmarking offering. Hopefully, that shouldn’t take too long but for the time being let me share with you what would be the 5 features I have been enjoying the most while trying out the tool. I am sure there are many more, but these are the ones have made me consider a switch from one to the other. Thus here it goes:
- Ability to subscribe to RSS Newsfeeds: Indeed, with this particular option and pretty much like with all the other social bookmarking tools, you get the chance to see what everyone else is bookmarking and therefore be able to find connections with common interests reflected in the selection of those bookmarks. Quite handy to build a list of friends to share some further thoughts with.
- Ability of backing up your bookmarks: For sure this is one of my favourite features not just because of BlinkList but more because of the different issues we have been experiencing with del.icio.us and its several outages. So now that I can backup my bookmarks certainly makes me feel much more comfortable and why not, offer a very strong case to forget del.icio.us and start using BlinkList much more heavily. Thumbs up !
- Ability of importing already existing bookmarks from other tools: I know that I have mentioned this already but I feel it is also a very neat feature from the perspective that if you decide to give it a try you can already start with a whole bunch of bookmarks you may already have so that you can see how it will all work, instead of just having to build up your lists from zero, once again. Only thing that I would like to see in here as well is the ability to not only import bookmarks but also export them, so that, for instance, I can get them in sync with our IBM internal offering. That would be pretty neat, indeed.
- Its ease of Use: This is one of the biggest improvements I have seen since last time I used it extensively. BlinkList is a whole lot more user friendly now that it was a few weeks ago and that is something that I find quite interesting as it shows that there is a commitment to improve things for the end-user and try to make that social bookmarking experience the most effective it can be for us all. Navigating through the different options, settings, and whatever other choices is just done quite nicely and without much hassle of having to try to figure out where you are at all times, like it happens with some other tools. Thus another thumbs up on this one !
- And, finally, another great feature that I have always enjoyed quite a lot is the fact that I can get to see all of my bookmarks on a specific Tag Cloud: I have been a big fan of tagging (I am already working on a couple of weblog posts on the subject that I will be sharing later on in time) so the fact that BlinkList allows me to have a very graphical display of my bookmarks through tag clouds is a big plus as well. You can see how I have been making extensive use of tags with offerings like TagCloud, Tagalag, so I would not be surprise that this feature, next to the other four that I have mentioned above, would eventually entice me to continue making much more use of BlinkList as opposed to other social bookmarking tools and offerings.
Oh, and in case you are wondering what I basically do with the rest of the other social bookmarking offerings like Furl, Spurl, Simpy, populicio.us, etc. etc. I just basically subscribe to their different RSS Newsfeeds as more than once I am bound to end up reading through a whole lot of interesting sites regarding KM, Communities of Practice, Social Networking, Collaboration and Productivity Tools, which is something that I have always found very handy if I would want to expand my horizons a bit and get exposed to more stuff. But as I said, so far del.icio.us is the main source I am currently using for storing my online bookmarks, although after having created this weblog post and having tried to use BlinkList much more extensively with all these new improvements I wouldn’t be surprised if things would change very shortly. But how about you? Which one does meet your needs the best? Which one is your killer social bookmarking tool and why ?
Technorati Tags : Social+Bookmarking, BlinkList, del.icio.us, Simpy, Furl, Spurl, populicio.us, Flock, IBM
Hi,
Since you mentioned subscribing to feeds of interest provided by other social bookmarking services, I have a suggestion that, I think, would be both complementary and more valuable, and possibly more pleasant for you. If you are interested in KM, Communities of Practice, Collaboration, Social Networking and Work/Life Balance, then what would really serve your purpose are Simpy’s Groups!
Simpy’s Groups will allow you to invite other people from these fields into the Group (and they don’t have to already be Simpy members) and collaborate by bookmarking and tagging as a Group. Of course, you’d probably want to create a few Groups for different areas of interest.
Each Group has its own feed you can subscribe to, if you want to, and of course each Group has a _full-text_ search that can go against the full-text content of bookmarked pages, tags, titles, nicknames, descriptions, and any combination of these fields.
Anyhow, I hope this helps.
Oh, one more thing. You mentioned Opera. There is currently a bug in one of the 3rd party libraries I’m using for Simpy, so Opera users get logged out when they shouldn’t. While I’m working on the fix, you may want to use any other browser just to check out the fnctionality that i described above.
Thanks a lot, Otis, for the feedback comments and welcome to elsua! I must say that I was not aware of what you could do with Simpy Groups but the way you describe it could be really powerful, specially for larger groups of folks, whether they belong to a team or whether they are part of a community, independently of the actual subject matter. And certainly this option could be very powerful to help those groups build up a common library of web links that could then be shared with new members to the team or as a repository of essential links worth while saving and working with them further. Pretty nice ! I will be taking a look into the feature you describe above as soon as that bug for Opera gets fixed and if it does not happen soon enough then I will go ahead and give it a try with FireFox and see how it would work and if everything goes the way you describe above and how I think it could be used for virtual teams and communities I will be sharing these thoughts with the folks I collaborate with and see if we can make use of this neat feature.
Thanks again for sharing it with us and for dropping by ! Great stuff !
Luis – it sounds like you see the value of Groups! Excellent! I really need to work on that fix for Opera. It’s not really a Simpy bug, but some other tool’s bug, but I’ll try to help those people fix the bug and help Simpy users who prefer Opera, like you do.
Thanks a bunch, Otis, for the heads up ! Much appreciated ! I shall keep an eye on it and as soon as it gets fixed please do let us know. In the mean time I am going to check that groups functionality from Simpy on other browsers and see how it would go. Thanks again for dropping by !
I have been using Blinklist for a few months now and so far prefer it over all the social bookmark services I have seen. However, my primary use of it is to to simply bookmark my links for use on other computers. I like the ability to mark links “private” (del.is.ious has some know “privacy” issues) and the general ease of use. The Blinklist tool bar for Firefox works great and make frequent use of my Blinklist “QuickStart” page. So far my only complaint is that a few times Blinklist was not available…. of course it is still “Beta” (hey, so is GMail!) and I am sure it is going through some growing pains.
Hello Mike and welcome ! I am glad to see you have made it over here and have shared such valuable feedback comments ! Indeed, ever since I have posted this weblog post I have been making extensive use of BlinkList and so far I have been enjoying the experience quite a lot, actually. Regarding your comments with the performance I must say that I haven’t experienced many so far but I am not surprised to read from your comments about them. I guess that is what happens with Beta applications that are starting to grab some momentum from end-users who may have been using other popular offerings and want to have something new and fresh to try out and make use of. I guess that is one of the growing pains we will have to live with, but as long as the performance keeps being worked on I think we would be off to a good start. Thanks again for sharing your thoughts, Mike.
[...] And talking about another great feature from this particular release, is the much tighter integration with del.icio.us bookmarks through the Bookmarks option, so that you can add to your del.icio.us bookmarks all those weblog posts that you think would be worth while remembering and, most importantly, worth while sharing with others (Like I am about to try now). I know that some folks would think why I would be using this particular social bookmarking service when elsewhere I have mentioned that I am now currently using BlinkList. Well, did you know that you actually can import bookmarks into it from del.icio.us? So now it will make it all much more interesting I would think since both tools will get populated and expanded further. [...]
[...] (Usually) No notification for follow-up comments: Yes, indeed ! This may be something that is currently happening with most of the weblogging engines and for this I have seen a number of different solutions adopted by many webloggers. I particularly like the one to bookmark those weblog posts where I have placed some comments in and that I may want to check on them at a later time using my favourite social bookmarking service(s), whether that would be BlinkList or del.icio.us. [...]
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[...] Making Sense of Social Bookmarking Offerings: Detailed comparison of BlinkList and del.icio.us Keywords: KM [...]
[...] Next to making use of del.icio.us‘ tags for KM I also follow quite regularly these tags from BlinkList: KM, KnowledgeManagement, Learning&Knowledge, Collaboration, PKM, SocialNetworking, SocialSoftware, Communitiesofpractice. [...]
[...] In the past you would remember how I have been creating a number of different weblog posts around the subject of social bookmarking indicating a good number of benefits in the Knowledge Management area about why people would want to make extensive use of such tools in order to be able to contribute to that collective wisdom by sharing their favourite bookmarks with everyone else, not just the closest teams / communities to themselves. I have also been indicating how so far I am currently making use of two different social bookmarking tools as my preferred choices: IBM’s Dogear (For my Intranet bookmarks) and BlinkList (For my Internet bookmarks). Reason why I like these two options is because I feel they are the ones providing with a much more complete experience of what I think social bookmarking should be: i.e. as interactive as possible. [...]
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