Social Bookmarking: The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly

I would like to share a recent tale of woe, involving the website Delicious. I used to use Delicious several years ago, when it was owned by Yahoo, to save bookmarks across multiple devices. In the most recent years, I let my account fall by the wayside as I found it easier to manage bookmarks locally instead. A couple months ago, I decided I wanted to start using Delicious again. So, I tried logging into my account, and it kept on giving me errors telling me the username was not found. Username not found? That’s impossible!  I’ve been using the site for years prior without any problems. After more research, I figured out exactly what had happened. Delicious was recently purchased by the founders of YouTube and users had a certain window of opportunity to transfer their account information over. And if they missed that window? Their information was lost forever with no way to retrieve it. All those years of bookmarking, tagging, and organizing were just gone all because a website changed ownership. I was ready to cry. Thankfully, I had synced all of my Delicious bookmarks up to my local computer a long time ago, so the majority of them were still intact. But, I would still have to manually re-add them if I wanted to continue using the site.

This was a harsh reminder that Web 2.0 tools are never really permanent, especially when the dealing with cloud. We sometimes take for granted these sites where all our information is stored elsewhere. These tools can – and often – do change ownership and when they do, all sorts of problems can arise. It is important that if organizations, such as libraries DO choose to take advantage of these services, that they back up all of their information so it is not lost.

That’s not to say that these tools don’t have their benefits. Libraries can use bookmarking features as a way to easily share resources and information with patrons. Patrons could follow the libraries on these social bookmarking sites to easily add bookmarks to their personal accounts, if need be. These links could also be grouped by different subjects based on the library. For instance, an academic library could tag their links by appropriate areas of interest, so Math majors would only see links relevant to them, and so on. Since the social bookmarking feeds are published as RSS, anyone can subscribe to them with any platform, even if they do not have a social bookmarking account themselves.

Delicious and Diigo both have their strengths and weaknesses. Previous experiences aside, Delicious has a very nice layout since it was relaunched. I like how you can add bookmarks multiple ways. When you do add a popular website, suggested tags come up of what to tag it with. You can also add a picture, if need be, and add a group of links to a stack that you can make public, if you wish. With Diigo, I liked how it incorporated highlighting of important notes on a page. I also like how some bookmarks contained cached versions (but only the really popular sites). I did not like how Diigo required that you installed a browser plug-in to add links (I was using Chrome). If Delicious can easily add a way to add a link with no browser buttons required, why can’t Diigo? I did find the layout of a Delicious user page a little more informative than Diigo.

Here is a link to my Delicious page, and here is a link to my Diigo page.