roxomatic
Future of social bookmarks - some ideas
I have made several attempts to give a short overview of the features social bookmarks’ services offer.
But which are the features these services really must or should have?
Saving pages or not…
For me, this is not a really important point. Off-line browsers or ScrapBook do a good job. Only few services offer this feature (Furl, Spurl, HLOM and Gibeo). One thing I really would like to have there is an option Skip saving, because in many cases I do not need a copy.
Application Programming Interface (API)
del.icio.us was one of the first services to offer an API. This may have been the main reason for hundreds of geeks to use it and build a strong community, with dozens of hacks. An API motivates geeks to collaborate and contribute hacks and ideas.
Importing by any means
You need interesting users that contribute interesting bookmarks. But very often they already have an account elsewhere. So help them to switch! HLOM imports any file with URIs in it. This is the right way.
Interaction
One of the things that made me switch from Furl to Spurl is the possibility to post bookmarks to Spurl and del.icio.us with one click. Another fine thing is – in general – to synchronize your accounts at different services (in most cases with del.icio.us). It is much better to offer this interaction than to ignore other competitors.
Easy interface
You need to have an interface that offers all you need (select your tags from a list, see the new del.icio.us interface or Blogmarks) – but nothing more. HLOM has a very complex interface – do you think this is helpful?
Spread the word…
A really good service must provide a news channel. There are some that don’t. Furl promises a newsletter I never received. Show new features and new hacks, don’t hide them. Demonstrate your innovation. Sometimes even minor features get successful – e.g. tagging.
...and your software
There are many ideas to be realized. Foxylicious is just a good beginning. What about more than just sidebars? Cross-platform bookmark editors that help to reorder, to synchronize and to retag your entries. Let your service work with things like this. And we are still waiting for a kind of really good backup tool.
You can even go further: Why don’t you spread your server software as open source (like unalog)? Difficult question. Maybe you lose some users that set it up on their own servers. But most users don’t have an own server, and many others prefer bookmarking inside a community. You may perhaps gain more and quicker development of your software.
These are just some spontaneous ideas.
# · 28. März 2005, 14:39 · 446 Wörter
Kategorien social bookmarks & tagging · Tags: socialbookmarks
2 Kommentar(e) · Kommentieren!
And from my wish list: integration with RSS aggregators. This is the place where many people consume Web content and where I would prefer a real bookmark service over an arcane clipping tool (e.g. the one in Bloglines).
This works with Bloglines and Blogmarks – see here – there are also other solutions with Greasemonkey and Firefox.