Bookmark this

There’s been a new craze sweeping the Internet in the “Web 2.0” era. Well, maybe not so new, because there were some aborted attempts back in the pre-dot-com bubble era. But it’s been growing over the past couple of years, and for the life of me, I can’t understand why.

The craze is social bookmarking sites like Ma.gnolia and del.icio.us. I don’t use them, nor do I see any compelling reason to start using them.

What is social bookmarking? In a nutshell, social bookmarking allows people to keep their bookmark collections on a web site instead of on just their computer.

That’s it! That’s all that social bookmarking is! There’s more features that individual sites will have that support that basic premise, but when all is said and done that’s what these sites do: they let people keep bookmarks on a web site instead of on just their computer.

Sounds fine, right? I mean, there’s no dispute there: storing bookmarks online is really useful. For one thing, you can access those bookmarks anywhere. No matter which computer you’re using, you can view them. Since they’re online, they’re always backed up, meaning you’ll never have to worry about your bookmarks if you have to reinstall your OS.

Another advantage of having bookmarks online is that you can make them public, so that other people on the Internet can see what you’ve found and what sorts of interests you have. Also, with having your bookmarks online, other people will only see the bookmarks that you think are worth seeing. You find these sites through other people, instead of cryptic search algorithms.

None of these things are in dispute. But it doesn’t make sense to me to limit those features to just a small collection of sites on the web for which you have to register, or to expect anyone who wants to see these bookmarks to go to a centralised site to do so.

Maybe I’m just not seeing it, but the way that people seem to use these is the same as having a blogroll/link page, or having a link blog.

It’s not that I’m a neo-luddite or anything, but I strongly believe that you don’t need two tools that do the same job. All these things are already done by individual peoples’ web sites, and from what I’ve seen done more elegantly.

For example, take a look at Jeffrey Zeldman’s bookmarks on Ma.gnolia. This is what replaces his Externals page, and simultaneously feeds his “Marked in Ma.gnolia” link blog in the side bar.

So now you have one service that blends the functions of two separate web paradigms into one. There’s no distinction, now, between long-term bookmarks and “links of the moment.” So when you go to his Ma.gnolia page, you have no way other than “search” or just going page-by-page to find the particular bookmark you’re looking for.

For example, let’s say that you want to see what other blogs he reads on a regular basis. Using his old site, you’d just look in the “blogger nation” section of his Externals page. Easy as pie. But when you go to his Ma.gnolia page, you’re presented with no discernible way of finding that same information. Sure, you see a lot of links to blog posts, but there’s a missing social unit of “I like this blog enough to read it regularly, and I think you should check it out because, as a regular reader of my site, you know who I am and trust my judgement on these things.” I’ve found many a good blog that way, and it would be a shame to lose that as a method of site discovery.

Want to make your bookmarks private? It seems to me that’s what the built-in bookmark function in your browser is for. Worried about what’ll happen to those bookmarks if you have to wipe your hard drive? Use a bookmark syncing service like Google Browser Sync for Firefox or .Mac’s Safari bookmark syncing or SafariDepot or any of the myriad of other syncing services.

In fact, just about every advantage I’ve seen is something that I can already do in one way or another using tools already at my disposal. Maybe I just don’t get it, but I don’t see anybody using social bookmarking in a way that’s better than what’s already available.

As an aside, I am somewhat tickled by the fact that nobody calls them “favourites” anymore. I always thought Microsoft was doing an extreme disservice by calling them that in Internet Explorer as a means to differentiate their browser from others, as it lead to browser user interface incongruity. Besides, “bookmarks” just sounds better.