Four social bookmarking sites
Below are descriptions of four of the more popular social bookmarking sites, and more specifically those I think might be most useful for my clients.
- Delicious.com
One of the original social bookmarking sites, delicious.com has a newly redesigned interface. It's still very clean, bare-bones, and intuitive to use, but much more attractive than its previous incarnation. It claims to have "the biggest collection of bookmarks in the universe." The only problem is, delicious was adopted very early by web design and and programming folks, so the bookmarked sites are heavily slanted towards those topics.
- Digg.com
Digg.com adds another dimension to saving bookmarks: rating them, or rather, "digging" them. If you see a site you like, you "digg it," and the sites with the most diggs rise to the top. You can also leave comments about the site.
Digg's interface is a little cluttered and hard to follow. My biggest complaint is that when you click on a bookmark's title, rather than going directly to the bookmarked site, you are taken to digg's page about that bookmark, which shows a summary, the number of diggs, and all the comments about the site, none of which I really care about.
- StumbleUpon.com
StumbleUpon has a really fun approach to finding new sites along your interests. Unlike other sites, with StumbleUpon, you have to download an add-on to your browser tp take full advantage of it, but it's painless and is available for Explorer and Firefox.
Once you've created an account and installed the add-on, as you browse the web, you can click the "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" button. StumbleUpon learns your interests and when you click the "Stumble" button, it takes you to a new site according to those interests. There are a lot of other features, including tagging and friends, but for me the Stumble has the most appeal.
Judging by the most popular tags, StumbleUpon also has a user base with a broader range of interests.
- Ma.gnolia.com
While ma.gnolia.com currently ranks 19th on the list of the top 30 social bookmarking sites, I'm including it here because the interface is so well-designed and easy to use. It provides basically the same functions as stumbleupon.com (minus "stumbling"), but also saves a copy of your bookmarked page for later reference. This can be handy because web pages with dynamic content often move or expire.
Plus the interface is just so darn pretty.
How to choose
In choosing a social bookmarking site to save your bookmarks to, try to find out which one others with your interests are using. People in your field may have gravitated towards one site over another. Explore the popular tags and do searches on the site, to see if you can find new sites that interest you.