In general, I am not a big fan of social bookmarking. I admit that it is interesting and may prove useful to some people in certain situations but after using it for two weeks, I do not see myself continuing to use it. I feel that social bookmarking serves as more of a tool to aid in procrastination than it does in constructive internet searching. Thus, social bookmarking is a great tool if you are looking to procrastinate, but if you are looking to productively browse the internet, stick to old fashioned google or yahoo.
Even though I do not support the cause that social bookmarking stands for, I admit it is pretty cool. The first thing I like about del.icio.us is that it automatically installs a tag and home button on the internet toolbar of the user. This makes it extremely convenient for the user to tag sites on their delicious account. In addition to the ease of tagging, delicious is good because the buttons in the toolbar allow the user to search normally using google or whichever search engine they prefer; the user does not have to be restricted by needing to search on a foreign internet browser. Also, I like delicious's interface. It is aesthetically pleasing and very easy to personalize. I am also a big fan of the many features offered by delicious; the coolest one is tag rolls. It was a really good idea to enable users to insert a tag cloud into any web page, be it a blog or a personal site. Lastly, I found the facebook integration tool interesting. I doubt many people will use this feature, however, it is a good idea and it wouldn't surprise me if some people did use it.
The partner I chose to share del.icio.us tags with was Shaan from the x17 section. His del.icio.us name is shaanaga and I was impressed by the ease of sharing on this social bookmarking site. I found some of Shaan's articles interesting such as the article on India's attempt to catch up to leading countries in the technology world. It was very easy to share information with Shaan. All I had to do was click the "your network" tab, type his name in the box and click "add."
Once I added Shaan to my network, all I had to do to view his information was click on his name. Upon doing so, all of the sites Shaan tagged appear on the screen and delicious allows me to view anything that he has tagged.
Digg.com was the second social bookmarking site which I chose to test drive for a week. I chose this site because I have heard my friends talking about it and was interested to see the differences between digg.com and del.icio.us. The first difference that I noticed right off the bat was that digg.com did not insert a new button onto the web browser's tool bar. This is bad for two reasons; first, it is not as easy to tag sites because the user does not have the button on their task bar, but the more important drawback to this is that to tag a page in digg.com, the user has to be using digg.com's search engine. In my opinion, this takes away from the amount of usage digg.com receives because users are less likely to sign into digg.com when they begin to search the internet. Delicious didn't have this problem because the user does not have to be signed into delicious to tag something to their account. In contrast, the fact that user's have to use the dig search engine may help digg.com in that user's will switch from their prior search engine choice to digg's. Another feature I noticed about digg.com is that it gives the user a choice of frequently viewed videos for that day. As I said before, most of these videos are mindless and only exist for the sake of entertainment, but a lot of them are worth watching if free time needs to be filled. In addition to the videos, Digg.com has a list of different subject users may be interested such as business, world news, technology, science, and entertainment. These features further underscore a user's need to search via the digg.com search engine.
Sharing information between different users on Digg.com was not as easy as it was on delicious. The process of adding friends to my account was very similar to that of delicious in that all you had to do was click add friends, search for them, then add them to your network. The difference is that using Digg.com, when you click on a friend, their profile comes up, which shows not only their recently tagged items, but their other recent activity such as when they got an account with dig or who they are adding to their network. This feature is great because it makes internet stocking even easier. !!
All in all, my opinion on social bookmarking remains unchanged. For the most part, I think it is a waste of time and only serves as a tool to further delay our already procrastinating generation from doing what they need to get done. However, I do recognize some practical uses for these sites such as accessing previously viewed material on the internet from another computer and displaying a tag cloud on your blog to let people know who's interested in what. Furthermore, I rate del.icio.us an 8 out of 10 because they deliver a good product, but could offer some better searching tools and I rate digg.com a 7 out of 10 because even though they have an extensive search engine, I think it will be hard convert people from using their favorite search engines such as google and yahoo.
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