How do you save your favorites (bookmarks)? Do you save them locally on each of your computers (at work and at home and on your laptop)? If so, that out-dated method is a real pain to manage because your collection of favorite websites will be different on each computer. You will have some links on one computer and some on another. It is a nightmare and impossible to keep in sync and if something bad ever happens to that computer (not if, but when) then all those favorites are gone, along with anything else you forgot to back up.
Social Bookmarking Age
Fortunately, one of the hottest services on the web today is social bookmarking. These sites allow you to save your bookmarks online so you will have access to your favorite websites no matter what computer you are using. It also becomes a good backup in the event your computer crashes because your entire collection is stored safe and sound online.
The tough part is selecting which social bookmarking site to use! There are so many excellent choices available today that you will need to try several of them to see which one suites you best. Everyone surfs differently, so you will need to make your own decision. This will be a quick and dirty primer on the most popular social bookmarking sites avaible today.
Microsoft’s Live Favorites can save your favorites online. It has the best looking site and offers the ability to view your bookmarks as folders like in your Internet explorer or as labels (i.e. tags). You can import your bookmarks from your local computer or even from your delicious account. Best of all and unlike all the others, Live Favorites can automatically synchronize your local favorites with your online favorites! The bad news is that there is a ridiculously low 1000 favorite limit so it will not be a good solution for power users. It also needs to include more social networking features like the other services offer such as widgets and badges. Also needed are multiple levels of sharing. Right now it’s either private or public. We need to be able to share with individuals or groups. Important note: You will need to get the Live Favorites Toolbar to take full advantage of its features.
Google Bookmarks allows you to save bookmarks online like the rest but their new google toolbar offers many bookmark management options.
Yahoo Bookmarks is similar to google bookmarks in that its power really comes from using its toolbar. You can import all your favorites and start saving your bookmarks online.
Delcious is the most popular social bookmarking site. It allows you to do all of the standard things such as importing,exporting and it has a toolbar button that makes saving bookmarks to your online account very easy. It also excels when it comes to sharing your favorites with your friends or with the public. There are a ton of third party tools that work with delicious.
magnolia is similar to delicious. Prettier look and adds the ability to share links with a group instead of just individuals.
furl is different because it allows you to actually save the contents of any webpage to your account for future reference, not just the link to the page which can change and look radically different the next time you visit it.
spurl is another popular bookmarking site that does less than the others on this list.
FAVES (formerly BlueDot.us) is swiftly becoming one of the most popular social bookmarking services. Its biggest strength is the way that it allows you to share bookmarks with individuals instead of the ALL public or All private model that Delicious offers. It still doesn’t allow group sharing of bookmarks but it’s a step in the right direction.
Social Bookmarking Widgets, Gadgets and Button, oh my!
Most websites will provide a quick and easy method for saving their link to your social bookmarking service of choice. You can save bookmarks as well as RSS feeds.
Two of the most popular ones are:
ShareThis which will look like this allows you to save/share bookmarks to these services:
AddThis is another service that has widgets that can appear like any of these:
Addthis offers a greater variety of sites that you can save a link or RSS feed to:
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Final Thoughts:
In this mobile age we live, we must be able to access our data and information wherever we go. Managing our favorites/bookmarks online makes perfect sense. We just need to pick the one that we feel most comfortable using and get into the habit of saving them online so we can get to our collection no matter where we are in the world. Also, we need to get into the habit of adding tags (keywords) for every link we save. This makes our collection more powerful when it comes to searching and sharing them.