What’s the personal benefit of social bookmarking? May 12, 2006
Posted by Steve in : enterprise, search, bookmarking , trackbackOne of the common claims I hear about the value of bookmarking sites like del.icio.us is that “bookmarking benefits the user first.” It’s often said in support of the Del.icio.us Lesson (even if they don’t use that particular term) and the corollary is that after people find enough value in personal bookmarking, they will go on to share information, get recommendations, etc. The individual benefit, in this case, is “re-findability.” Since I’d like to make sure our product reaches widespread enterprise adoption, I’m trying to make sure we have a good personal use case before tackling the social part. And I’m curious: does social bookmarking really offer the benefit of re-findability?
The reason I ask this is because I never use tag search. It’s partially because tag search often doesn’t combine with regular search. Del.icio.us doesn’t index the contents of pages, just the title, tags and notes you’ve saved. This means you have to remember exactly how you tagged something; that’s not always an easy task (and it’s probably worse for a beginning tagger, who likely tags with a few very general tags.)
Even assuming a service that stores and indexes full page content, such as furl or Yahoo MyWeb, I still have a more reliable helper when finding an article I know I’ve seen before: I turn to desktop search. It almost always returns the right thing much faster than I could have found it on del.icio.us, and searches through more content repositories. Better yet, it turns up things that I hadn’t thought to bookmark yet… This is incredible return for zero investment.
If tag search doesn’t work well for me yet, perhaps the list of saved items improves my ability to re-find articles? I’ll admit that I originally joined the service in search of a way to easily synchronize bookmarks between my work and home machine - clearly a personal benefit. However, when I look at my own habits since adopting del.icio.us, I find that I don’t ever use my saved links as bookmarks. For instance, there’s a webpage with a great CSS guide that I revisit a lot. Yet I don’t get there by going through my del.icio.us “css” tag. Why not?
First, getting to my saved links and clicking through takes longer than I’m willing to wait for a very common operation. This could probably be alleviated with a browser extension, although the best Firefox plugins I’ve found don’t solve this problem well yet. The other problem is that I’ll often save new CSS links, pushing my favorite link further down the page, until eventually it’s on page two - at which point it might as well not exist any more. 
This too could possibly be prevented through some sort of new “sticky” feature in an extension. But really, in the context of a potential enterprise application, it’s a bit optimistic to imagine many people using Firefox, much less extensions.
So if social bookmarking a) isn’t better than desktop search for (re-)finding articles, and b) doesn’t offer the best way to visit my favorite links, then why am I such an active bookmarker? Because I’m often marking up collections of items, usually without highlighting any one article over the others. If you look at the use cases for furl, for instance, you’ll see people saying basically the same thing. Sometimes I’m making the list for myself, more often I’m doing it with the intention of sharing. Sometimes the list is even being automatically created for me, which I’ll talk more about in a later post.
As I see it, this is (part of) a need that everyone has, which isn’t already best served by browser bookmarking or desktop search, and that’s what makes it work learning a new behavior and/or new application. So I don’t see our application as being for social bookmarking as much as it is for social list-making. To me, such an app isn’t really tasked with re-finding, except in the general sense of being able to survey all the items I’ve collected in a particular list. Maybe this is a bit of a very fine distinction… but in my next few posts I’ll explain why I think it’s an important one.
First, I’m looking for feedback. How do you use social bookmarking sites? Have I overlooked a way in which bookmarking benefits you personally?
Then, in my next post: does this really require tagging?
Tags:bookmarking bookmarks del.icio.us delicious enterprise search social
Comments»
I fully agree with you that finding saved web sites in del.icio.us is a pain in the neck. If you have five pages of bookmarks, how do you find a saved web site if you don’t remember the name of the tag? You have to go one by one until you find it. It just doesn’t make sense.
I know there is a feature for creating Collections, which I think resembles folders. If you remember in what collection you placed your site, Bingo!, but what if you don’t? You have to go to every folder and look for your missing site. Another pain in the neck. Now your neck is really stiff.
I prefer Firefox’s Bookmarks and the way it manages them. I use the search feature and the saved site is right there. Click on it and Voila, the site is there before you on the screen.
What I like about del.icio.us is that I can share my saved sites with my different browsers. I normally use Firefox, Flock, Opera and Netscape. If I save my sites in My del.icio.us page, it doesn’t matter what browser I’m using, I can always access my sites. I can’t do that with traditional bookmarks. The same holds true for work and home bookmarks.
Just my two cents worth regarding your post
Regards,
Omar.-.
I moved to Yahoo’s MyWeb because it offers full-text search against your bookmarked pages (and your friend’s pages) among other reasons:
eLearning Technology: Yahoo MyWeb better than del.icio.us, rollyo, et.al. for Personal / Group Learning
Like you I find tags to be of marginal value - but it helps with search.
What I would really like to find is a better “similar pages” function which is essentially what you are getting via tags in an ad hoc manner.
Omar - Thanks for your comment, and I couldn’t agree more. As I mentioned, that’s exactly the reason that I joined del.icio.us (work/home as well as IE/Firefox.) I still use it for that reason today … among many new other uses I’ve found.
Like you, I believe that browser bookmarks are a better way to do “bookmarking”, and search is a better way to re-find. Anyone who is attempting to convert the average enterprise user to share their bookmarks for the individual benefit alone will be facing an uphill climb (or a stiff neck, to use your metaphor.)
But I do believe that there are ways to benefit users with social bookmarking, or we wouldn’t have a product in the arena
In this series of posts I’m trying to distill the best ways to provide individual value - benefits that won’t require forcing users to do something they don’t want to do. Hope you’ll follow along and continue to provide your two centses!
Tony - yep, I like furl for the same reason. I haven’t switched from delicious yet because of the ease of integration - for instance the related links at the bottoms of my posts are all loaded on demand from delicious so I can continue to contribute to old articles directly from delicious.
I actually find tags to be pretty useful - but not for refindability. Rather, they help me divide my own space up. But I’m getting ahead of myself since that’s the topic of my next post!
And /you’re/ getting way ahead of myself with comments about “similar pages” functionality! That’s one of the points where my series of posts is leading
Aspects on social bookmarking
No TagsSome time ago, I wrote an article describing my views on the commerical (but yet free of charge) services that provide social bookmarking services. Having done some further research during the past week or so, I realized that there are a few goo…