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Social BookmarkersSo this brings us to the concept social bookmarkers. Social bookmarkers are websites and web applications that let individual users store bookmarks, and share these with online contacts. As earlier mentioned, there are different ways by which information is classified, shared, and considered relevant in social media. And the different social bookmarkers also reflect this.
Here are some of the notable social bookmarkers today. Delicious (http://del.icio.us) - Delicious started out as a basic site in which users can store bookmarks. What's innovative about this system is that it was among the first that used tagging as a means to organize bookmarks, as opposed to using hierarchical directories and subdirectories. Delicious lets users add "friends" to their contact list, and users can easily view bookmarks added by friends. Users can also make bookmark suggestions to friends. DIGG (http://digg.com) - DIGG fashions itself as a social bookmarking-cum-social news site. It features some of the salient aspects of a usual social bookmarker, such as adding of links and having a network of friends. However, DIGG is more of a news site, because the links on its system are voted upon, and those that garner enough "diggs" or votes gets promoted to the site's front page for a time. One advantage of DIGG is that each item has a corresponding comment thread, where users can discuss the merits of the item posted (or lack thereof). DIGG does not use folksonomy, though, but instead a pre-defined set of categories ranging from technology to entertainment to politics. Reddit (http://reddit.com) - Reddit is a community site much like DIGG. Items in the system can be voted up or down, depending on whether a user thinks it is newsworthy or not. One notable aspect of reddit is that users whose submissions are liked by other users and thus get voted up get positive "karma" points as a reward. StumbleUpon (http://stumbleupon.com) - StumbleUpon is a bookmarking system that is mainly used in conjunction with the web browser. A browser plugin or toolbar is installed, which lets users add bookmarks just by clicking. This also has a web interface, though, where users can add friends and view bookmarks by online contacts and other members. One unique aspect of StumbleUpon is that it lets users "stumble upon" websites that might be interesting by clicking on a button on the browser toolbar. This then directs the user to a random site bookmarked by other users. Here is a list of other social bookmarkers, according to Wikipedia. While there are currently a good number of social bookmarking sites available, most of these have similar features, or build upon the features of the more established ones. At the very least, most social bookmarkers cater to a niche audience.
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