Solo Technology

So far this week I’ve looked at del.icio.us, Simpy, Furl and Blinklist. In my (humble) opinion, all have their strengths and weeknesses — and all have interested folks watching for blog posts about themselves. In fact, that may have been the most interesting thing about the posts: watching to see who would reply next. Fun stuff, to be sure.

Am I done looking at these things? Probably not. What have I learned so far? Well, let me share a bit.

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.

So far, I find myself gravitating towards BlinkList most often.. but I’m not exactly sure why. Oh, and I tried the BlinkList Firefox extension. For about 5 minutes. Toolbar. /sigh Great concept, I just don’t like toolbars. The one from del.icio.us was much more appealing, to me at least. Just added a couple big buttons. But ya know, at the end of the day I just use the bookmarklets anyways.

Oh, and I had mentioned BlinkList’s “blink” buttons. Basically, it does a few things. Tells you how many people have “blinked’ that link. Click the main button and see who has it. But, click the lower “blink it” and you add it to your links as well. A quick way to look at other folks’ links and snag ‘em for yourself. Truly, it feels rather like digg…

Finally, I’m still hoping to learn more about OnlyWire… such a great idea, but apparently deep under cover. Anyone know of any other similar services?

Summary: Still have more to look at in this space. Even have a social search thing (seekum) to check out some day too. Liking BlinkList, but still intrigued by both Simpy, Furl and del.icio.us (about in that order I think). Making a decision just out of the 4 I’ve seen so far will be difficult. Wonder what the others will be like?

3 Responses to “Social Bookmarking so far”

1. Rich G. on January 20th, 2006 9:47 pm
   

   OK, now you’re just keyword whoring for other ppl to come advertise their wares in your comment section. I see the symptoms. Stuffing junk in your trunk for that long tail that you find so weirdly kewl.

2. Rich G. on January 20th, 2006 10:37 pm
   

   I’ve been playing with Blinklist for a while now and tagging stuff up, and like it mostly. We’ll see though. Oh yes, we’ll see… would be nice if I could find a way to edit multiple entries tags at once.

3. Otis Gospodnetic on January 20th, 2006 10:59 pm
   

   Rich G:
   Editing multiple links/tags at once? Check out Simpy’s “Bulk Edit” (or “Selectively Delete”, if you feel destructive) feature. Just do a search for anything, and bulk edit everyone on the SERP. Want to bulk edit absolutely everything? Just search for username:YourSimpyUsernameHere.

   Solo:
   tag watching - you may be better of creating a Topic that you are interested in, finding a few good people (Simpy users) who bookmark links with subjects that interest you, and adding them to your Topic. Then, if you want, create any number of Topic Filters (think of them as “saved searches”) and slice and dice your Topic any way you want.

   Say that you are interested in sailing. This is what you’d do:
   1. Go to Topics
   2. Add a Topic: Sailing
   3. Search for people with sailing links (just click on “add people” link on your Topic’s page). Add several people with good links and who are active.
   4. If you find that they also bookmark link of no interest to you, create 1 or more Topic Filters in that Topic
   5. Sit back and check out your Sailing Topic once in a while to get good stuff

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