To paraphrase Jon Udell: Tag-enabled applications open the door to new opportunities for bookmark management. del.icio.us is still the blueprint of all social and taggable bookmarking systems, but in the spirit of mimesis and alterity a decent number of alternatives have emerged.

(Inspired by Douglas Johnston’s Beginner’s Mind and Robert Daeley’s Zen Pockets I’m currently trying to clean up my del.icio.us bookmarks, but fail miserably in letting go of some applications…)

Here is a rundown of some other social bookmarking applications, I’ll just highlight the differences to del.icio.us, the list of features is not exhaustive.

BlogMarks – “enlarge your bookmarks”

  • BlogMarks has thumbnailed preview of URLs
  • you can mark bookmarks as private
  • tags are clouded by default; if you browse a tag, a subcloud of related tags appears
  • you can sort by popularity
  • you can search within the titles and descriptions of all users (not only your own)

Furl [furl.net]

Jots [jots.com]

  • it also caches the resources making them accessible even if the original has gone
  • it’s written in Ruby (which usually is an indicator that it’s a work of love…)
  • it has got a view called Link Leaders (who was the first to bookmark a popular URL)
  • and a built-in post to blog feature
  • and a jotted? bookmarklet (has an URL been jotted by other members?)
  • you also can create groups for restricting bookmarks to distinguished persons only
  • and browse your archive by date added

Yahoo’s My Web 2.0 [myweb2.search.yahoo.com]

  • see my previous posting

Netvouz – “your bookmarks online”

  • you can mark bookmarks as private
  • it has got hotpicks (prefered spots for links you visit often)
  • and link validation
  • popular links are computed as aggregated hotpicks

Shadows – “tag comment rate search”

  • Shadows has the look and feel of a forum (users can add comments to bookmarks and rate them)
  • uses UberTags. “UberTags go where no tag has gone before” – basically by combining freshness and popularity

Simpy [simpy.com]

  • besides bookmarks you can add (and tag) notes
  • you can mark bookmarks as private
  • Simpy indexes the pages you bookmark so you can also search within the content (I’m not sure, if Simpy is also storing a cached copy)
  • you get boolean search!! for an arbitrary combination of search fields – see the documentation (this makes Simpy my undisclosed favorite)
  • you can add a search field for your simpyfied links to your blog
  • you can access your bookmarks programmatically via a REST api.

Spurl [spurl.net]

  • Spurl is a lot like Furl. You can not create a local backup of your archive, though.
  • has groovy publishing features (for adding categories to your blog,..)

StumbleUpon

  • a collaborative bookmarking / rating / discovery system
  • you can define interests, StumbleUpon will find a community with interests similiar to yours
  • you can rate links (thumbs up or down)

Happy Tagging!