The Selfish Side of Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking, one of the Web 2.0 hypes, allows you to share links with each other. This video from Common Craft clearly explained what social bookmarking is all about.

According to this explanation, using a social bookmarking site, like del.icio.us, allows you to share your bookmarks with everyone. For example, I could give you my personal del.icio.us profile link and I’d be sharing my bookmarks with you.

While this is very useful, for example when you need to give one of your co-workers all your resources about .net or grid computing, there’s also a selfish advantage to it.

Personally, I use about four computers I regularly work on. One of the things that used to annoy me was the fact that each of those machines had almost the same bookmarks. Sometimes it had some more or fewer than the other machines, or differently ordered, but never exactly the same.

That’s where del.icio.us and Firefox come to the rescue. Because I’m saving all my bookmarks centrally, I have access to them from each machine, without any effort, and they’re exactly the same on each machine as well. Additionally, whenever I add a new bookmark on one machine, the others instantly have access to it as well.

One disadvantage, however, might be the fact that you need an Internet connection, and are dependent on the service of del.icio.us being available. When that’s a concern, you can easily export your del.icio.us bookmarks and import them in Firefox. I don’t have a problem with it, since I’m pretty much always connected.

But it’s not only the synchronization part that’s nice, if that was the only thing, you might find a way to solve that differently. It’s the strong integration into Firefox that gives it its value. Just install the del.icio.us Bookmarks add-on for Firefox and it’s ready to replace your normal Bookmarks menu. From then on you’ll be able to categorize links with the help of tags, another additional personal benefit of social bookmarking. The easiest way to think of tags is as having the ability to put one bookmark into multiple subfolders while still being able to easily manage them.

Not using social bookmarking tools because you aren’t into all that Web 2.0 stuff? Would you start using it when it gives great personal added value? I would.

Update: del.icio.us shut down in 2017. Firefox now syncs bookmarks between machines itself with Firefox Sync.