As you may recall, I first posted about del.icio.us which earned a comment from the gentleman that appears to run Simpy. So, I posted about Simpy. That got me a comment from a gentleman associated with BlinkList. Somewhere in there I touched on Furl too. Nobody responded to that one. yet… This is an odd trend, but since I’m looking at Social Bookmarking tools, what the heck, I’ll go along with it. It certainly illustrates an interesting way of using “the long tail” in application marketing. Frankly, it works well on me as I’m a sucker for shiny new things.
BlinkList is definitely a shiny new thing. Of all that I’ve looked at, right up there with Simpy as far as being easy on the eye. At first glance, it seems rather cluttered. But as my eyes “tuned” in, the chaos took a bit of form and… I like it. Adding in the digg-like “blink” counters and the star rating system is a nice touch too. I’m not exactly sure what either really do yet, but I like.
Importing from del.icio.us and furl is supported, along with importing from your browser’s bookmarks. All options involve a bit of a two-step shuffle — get the data to a file, then load the file — but BlinkList holds your hand and makes it painless.
I’m still getting used to the tagging, so I’m not sure what all is available here. There appears to be some sort of “ajax’ish” auto-complete going on, but I’m not sure if it is pulling from my tags or the tags of other people who have tagged the same link.
Speaking of tags, the generated “tag cloud” for this thing (the left side of the page) is pretty darn sweet. As mentioned in the past, I’m a sucker for a nice tag cloud.
What can’t I do? Well, as I mentioned yesterday in the Furl post, I think more of these guys need to give us the ability to put some sort of watch on a tag or group of tags. As is somewhat common, BlinkList will let me put “friends” on watchlists, which could be handy someday (maybe), but I’m much more interested in watching for certain tags. But, since only one of the 4 services I’ve looked at appears to support this (del.icio.us), perhaps I’m in the minority? Dunno, but I suppose I’ll see if there are any feedback pages and offer it up.
All in all, there’a lot to like here. I’m not sure if I like Simpy or BlinkList best so far… and I wish both had some of the features from del.icio.us.
Possibly Related posts:
January 18th, 2006 
Tags: 
Keep on looking at them.
I like this with you doing all the work for me. I’ve wanted to like the social bookmarking thing for a while, and experimented with delicious about the time you did, but hated it… not kinda, but really really really didn’t ‘get’ how it’d become so widely accepted.
Anyway. Keep looking.
Let me know.
Social bookmarking seems to be exploding with new sites and ideas. I will keep your tag watchlist thoughts in mind for Seekum. Del.icio.us is my fave social bookmarking site so far as well. To keep with tradition I will leave a comment this time. I am the founder of Seekum.com a social search engine that allows our users to vote individual results up or down based on relevancy to the search query. I’d love it if you would stop by.
Hi,
Regarding tag watching – it’s coming to Simpy any day now, just need to iron out a few quirks.
I am a huge fan of BlinkList. I have enjoyed browsing around your blog. I am using the same theme as you, except mine is purple. Congradulations on quitting smoking.
Dawn
Handy’s long tail is just plain creepy at this point.
[...] First, for several I whinged that I wanted to be able to “subscribe to tags”. I’ve had replies via email and blog comments here that they all do indeed, to some extent, support this — or, as in Simpy’s case, will have it very soon. Awesome! As usual, I just wasn’t quite “getting it”, but I believe I do now. And RSS or clever urls is the ticket to doing this. Neat stuff. As a for instance, if I want to watch for “pocketpc” tags on Furl, I could just add http://www.furl.net/members/rss.xml?topic=pocketpc to my RSS reader and I’m set. Problem solved. [...]
[...] I blogged about these guys a month or so ago when I was trying to figure out the “Social Bookmarking” scene. I resisted picking a favorite for a while, but I kept finding myself back at BlinkList, so I finally caved and began using their service enthusiatically. [...]