by Emil Hunefalk

Created on: April 24, 2010

Social bookmarking comes in a variety of shapes - from the more social type seen in Facebook and Twitter to the more bookmarking focused services created only for organizing or backing up your bookmarks online, which in some cases have an option to share. There are quite a few websites offering services in between those two types - for example the "vote my bookmark" sites such as

Digg and Reddit, the collaboration and personal recommendation focused sites such as Diigo or Delicious or the "suggest a site" service of Stumbleupon.

The wide variety within the area makes you realize that social bookmarking is quite a wide concept, although not always perceived as such. Most people think of a narrow gap of the social bookmarking area when speaking of the topic, for which reason I will focus on the common perception instead of making a wide sweep to include the more social focused or the more bookmarking focused services out there - for that reason, services such as Xmarks (bookmark backup service with ability to share across browsers and computers) do not have a place in this article, although one could argue that it should.

So, to finally narrow our gap, with social bookmarking being such a wide concept - in general the term is mostly used for services such as the above mentioned Diigo and Delicious, or the "vote my bookmarks" sites also mentioned above. These services let you keep any bookmark online and share it with your friends, family, colleagues, community or anyone else who might be interested. The main social part is usually that you can "follow" or "become a fan of" (or similar) another person using the service, effectively letting you take part of websites he or she site at the moment.

One popular social bookmarking service lets you "stumble upon" new bookmarks by sharing your interests with the website and then recommending by giving a "thumbs up" to sites you like and a "thumbs down" if you arrive at a website you don't enjoy. This is primarily done through a browser toolbar (feel free to ask me about browsers and toolbars). If you have too much time to spare, this is a nice way to discover new websites within your sphere of interest. However, if you don't have too much time available, you might want to filter this type of service out.

Another popular social bookmarking service is provided through Delicious.com (owned by Yahoo!), which has quite a few simple ways of saving, sharing and accessing your bookmarks. In short, you save a bookmark as if it was your own, but in the process you are given an option to add "tags" to the bookmark, share with friends and other people from your network, and another option to keep the bookmark private. Keeping the bookmark private is of course not very social and will not be discussed further here. Meanwhile, adding tags to a saved bookmark you save tells both you and your network quite a lot about the website you have bookmarked. Recommending or sharing the bookmark with a friend gives you a further chance to learn something both about the friend and about the bookmark....

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