The Social Bookmarking Faceoff
Written by Alex Iskold and edited by Richard MacManus.
The social bookmarking market is in a steady state with two dominant players - del.icio.us and StumbleUpon. The rest of the pack, including Yahoo MyWeb, appears to be substantially behind. Will they catch up? In this post we attempt to answer that question.
We also take a look at how social bookmarking has evolved since del.icio.us. (even del.icio.us itself has evolved a lot!). We compare the features and approaches of the different companies, to see which has gained popularity and what has become the norm in this space.
A short history of social bookmarking
The current social web era started with del.icio.us and the advent of social bookmarking. The simple concept of a tag has turned our interactions with the web upside down. The idea of being able to store your bookmarks online, share them with everyone and see what others have bookmarked - triggered the sequence of events that resulted in today's rich and social web ecosystem.
We used the e-consultant and go2web20 lists of social bookmarking services to select the companies. Note that we did not include any company with an Alexa rank of less than 100,000. We also did not profile social news sites (like digg) or social shopping sites (like Kaboodle), as they will be profiled in separate R/WW posts.
Feature comparison
Note: Mouse over the column headings to see full text
| Site | Imp | Pop Rec |
Rel Dir |
Frd | Rat | Pri | Tag sug |
RSS | Wid | Brw | API | Pros | Cons |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
BlinkList Alexa: 3,600 Technorati: 63,794 |
x | x | x | x | x | x | x | x | x | x | BlinkSpaces - create a community out of your links, nice browser toolbar, all and all really nice. | A few broken links in places, a bit underdesigned for my taste. | |
Alexa: 9,000 Technorati: 48,331 |
x | x | x | x | Nicely designed, generate a post of your bookmarks for your blog | Seems incomplete compare to other sites. Injects ads. Crashed several times during my tests. | |||||||
del.icio.us Alexa: 155 Technorati: 1,597,818 |
x | x | x | x | x | x | x | x | x | x | Easy to use, intelligent, tons of useful features, not in your face | Not fancy, might not appeal to the main stream. | |
| Site | Imp | Pop Rec |
Rel Dir |
Frd | Rat | Pri | Tag sug |
RSS | Wid | Brw | API | Pros | Cons |
diigo Alexa: 13,750 Technorati: 2,262 |
x | x | x | x | x | x | x | x | Post to other bookmarking services, supports annotations with sticky notes, flexible blog integration. | A lot of options, might not be easy to learn for everyone, mixes a lot of things together. | |||
Furl Alexa: 2,400 Technorati: 126,000 |
x | x | x | x | x | x | x | x | x | Has archiving, simple browser add-on, has some additional options associated with the post. | Lacks related items, could use a re-design. | ||
Ma.gnolia Alexa: 9.400 Technorati: 82,800 |
x | x | x | x | x | x | x | x | x | Beautiful design, nice implementation of groups, well thought through | Does not look very active, lack of browser add-ons and imports, lacks unique features. | ||
MyWeb Alexa: 1 (for Yahoo!) Technorati: 76,000 |
x | x | x | x | x | x | x | x | x | Nice look and feel, could work for main stream. | Too many things in the toolbar, falls short of del.icio.us on many features. | ||
| Site | Imp | Pop Rec |
Rel Dir |
Frd | Rat | Pri | Tag sug |
RSS | Wid | Brw | API | Pros | Cons |
Shadows Alexa: 13,000 Technorati: 11,140 |
x | x | x | x | x | x | x | x | x | Fairly comprehensive set of features, clean design | Popular is done by tags instead of by links, site is somewhat slow, does not feel as connected as del.icio.us | ||
Simpy Alexa: 14,600 Technorati: 35,000 |
x | x | x | x | x | x | x | x | x | Instantly view current page history, browser export | Could use UI improvements, no popular links, similar links are not cross users, too many first level menues in Firefox extension | ||
StumbleUpon Alexa: 617 Technorati: 33,500 |
x | x | x | x | x | A different approach, that seems to be successful, given the number of users. Nice browser toolbar. | Would be great to have directory and browse related. |
Estimating the number of users
Companies typically do not reveal the number of users and activity, but we can do educated estimates. In a recent post on TechCrunch, Michael Arrington stated that there are about 53 million posts on del.icio.us. Based on the statistics mentioned at the time of the del.icio.us acquisition (by Yahoo) in December 2005, and the growth since then, we estimate the current number of people using del.icio.us at 500,000 [UPDATE since this post was first published, del.icio.us announced they have 1,000,000 users]. From this we conclude that the average user on del.icio.us did a little over 100 posts. This is a pretty impressive number, although it might be the case that there is a fat tail and a handful of users with a huge number of posts.
If we use 100 posts per user as a guide then, we can do similar estimates for other social bookmarking companies. For example, since Blogmarks has a total of 514,205 posts, we estimate that they have roughly 5,000 users.
Here is another interesting angle... a search on Yahoo MyWeb for items tagged "food" results in 7,200 bookmarks. A similar search on BlinkList brings up 120 pages with 20 items per page - or 2.400 bookmarks. In other words, the number of posts tagged with a particular word or term can be used as another relative measure of the number of users.
Finally, here is another method for estimating the number of users. We took a recently popular web2.0 list url: go2web20.net, as well as all time favorite CNN.com, and looked at how many people have bookmarked these on various services. If we do this for a hundred or so randomly choosen URLs, we would get more precise estimates - but this is just to give us an approximation of the number of users. Here is a table showing our results:
| Site | Links to go2web20.net | Estimated users based on go2web20.net | Links to cnn.com | Estimated users based on cnn.com |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| BlinkList | 40 | 14,800 | 568 | 38,200 |
| Blogmarks | 5 | 1,800 | 56 | 3,700 |
| del.icio.us | 1,354 | 500,000 (baseline) | 7,429 | 500,000 (baseline) |
| Diigo | 21 | 7,750 | 32 | 2,150 |
| Furl | 53 | 19,600 | 200 | 13,500 |
| Ma.gnolia | 9 | 3,300 | 51 | 3,400 |
| Shadows | 1 | 370 | 21 | 1,400 |
| Simpy | 9 | 3,300 | 312 | 21,000 |
| Stumble Upon | 1,271,345 (public) | 1,271,345 (public) |
NB: With MyWeb, the estimated users is 114,600. As it turns out we can't compute it with the same method, because information is not quite there. Instead, we used the Tag Comparison method and compared it with BlinkList.
Conclusion
The social bookmarking market is dominated by del.icio.us and StumbleUpon. These leaders split the market, as they bring orthogonal approaches to bookmarking - del.icio.us builds a hierarchy for people to browse (it does related relationships, etc.), while StumbleUpon is more of a random discovery system.
Meanwhile the other players in this market have a lot of ground to make up on the two leaders, based on our analysis in this post.
Update: Added Furl - thanks to Barry Dahl for pointing it out (comment #3).
Update 20/9/06: More updates to the tables and figures above, based on comments.
Update 5/10/06: Updated del.icio.us figure in the main text.
Share12 TrackBacks
TrackBack URL for this entry: http://www.readwriteweb.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/2766
Comments
Subscribe to comments for this post OR Subscribe to comments for all ReadWriteWeb posts
Great post Alex! :-)
Please check the links for blogmarks please.
Good catch Anol, I've updated that link. Thanks.
Hello Alex and Richard,
I'm curious why you didn't include furl.net in your list. I've always thought of it as a social bookmark tool ... is it better categorized elsewhere? Alexa has it ranked #2 in their "Most Popular In Bookmark Managers" listing after del.icio.us
Just curious. I've used del.icio.us longer than furl, but I'm starting to find some of the extra features that furl provides to be somewhat compelling. Thanks for the list. Barry
Barry, thanks for the comment. Meant to add it, but then forgot. Will add soon.
Alex
excellent post.
Great post! You said that you found some broken links on our site www.blinklist.com. Can you please let me know where?
Thanks,
Mike
I think, unless your columns mean something radically than what they seem to mean, you're missing many of the main Furl features. I used to work for Looksmart and Furl definitely has (a) related links (look at any of the URL profiles), (b) friends (contacts and subscribers), (c) private bookmarks and bookmark categories, and (d) import. However, they did not, when I last checked, have API or tag suggestion.
Cheers,
Andre
Good research Alex. Those numbers would be useful for my next post.
Great post Alex, have been looking out for something like this for a while...
Great post, I'm wandering what you think about recently released Windows Live Favorites ? I think it could become an important player in the area as it is under the Windows Live umbrella.
gr8 reading, but could you please add RawSugar to your comparison?
http://www.rawsugar.com/
i think it is a great site which also offers some unique options that the other services don't have.
Hello,
disclaimer : i'm one of blogmarks.net founders.
It seems you missed some features while reviewing the service :
* Friends : the feature is present
* Privacy : I'm not sure about what this means, but in blogmarks a link can be marked as "private" (thus not shown on public areas)
* Tag suggestion : suggest tags from the one you have (no related tags suggestion)
* RSS : Blogmarks publishes RSS feeds for all public urls
* Widgets : there's one for netvibes
* Browser add-on : There's a (very simple) firefox extension
* API : Blogmarks exposes an ATOM API
Blogmarks is far from being perfect but it's not as ill featured as your review suggests ;)
Mike (Blinklist): I can't seem to find the broken links anymore. Might be that this is fixed, or, because I looked at quite a few sites, I am not heading to the right place.
Alex
Andre / Michel, will double check Furl and Blogmarks later today and will fix if necessary.
Alex
Nicolas: Windows Live Favorites is not familar to me, I can't really comment.
Alex
Jack of all trades: We looked at rawsugar, it did not seem to fit. Why do you think that it should be part of the post?
Alex
Nice comparation man! Thanks
Alex : Thanks :)
i also forgot to mention that ads are only shown to unregistered users.
Alex, nice review. But what about verticals like
BandBuzzer, IndieCentra,Indiamarks ,Philippine Country Bookmarks, Wink ??
I think it would have been good to see trending on niche verticals along side the generic.. these verticals may have greater stickiness due to localization and geography.. !!
Hi there,
Great work on the comparison -I found it a worthwhile read. I was wondering why Blue Dot (http://bluedot.us) was not included in your comparison. I work there and we just cracked Alexa 20,000 last month (you said you were looking up to 100,000). I also think we compare favorably to some of the people who have been on the market for a while. We tend to have a heavier "social" component in the "social bookmarking" space.
Thanks!
Eric
rawsugar allows you to save bookmarks online and interact with bookmarks other people have saved by subscribing to them and searching through them. you can also search through all the bookmarks in this service, tag them, write notes about them, and so on.
if you go over everything you have in ur table, it seems to me that rawsugar supports all of this features except for ratings.
in addition you can use it to tag ur blog post and use it to search through them.
in 3spots, they also included Rawsugar in their social bookmarks list, but for reason i do not understand, it is considered as a social bookmark manager.
http://3spots.blogspot.com/2006/01/all-social-that-can-bookmark.html#sbmr
how come you though it shouldn't be part of this post?
I'm actually a big Ma.gnolia user. I think they have created a bevy of very unique features that are more true to the "social" aspect of social bookmarking.
They just released a handful of new ones yesterday, including a del.icio.us API mirror that allows del.icio.us hacks to work on Ma.gnolia.
Hey, Great Post.
I am a user of Delicious, Magnolia, and Blinklist. All 3 have very similar features but I find that Delicious works best for me. Perhaps it is because I started using them first. The reason why I use all 3 is because I like to use them for linkrolling to my blog - does anyone know of a way to have 1 service manage 3 seperate lists so that I don't have to use 3 services?
Thanks,
Justin
StumbleUpon Rap!
http://virtualmagic.blogspot.com/2006/07/stumbleupon.html
Where is RawSugar and Wink? Both have tagging services that not only would have checks in nearly every box you evaluated by, but they go beyond that with social search and providing a more precise recall (Stumble Upon is horrible at this).
I would also add that Yahoo MyWeb has Friends and Privacy. Both of these elements are insanely helpful when searching. In fact these elements are part of the regular Yahoo search results if you use MyWeb and provides a much better search relevance than any other search engine on the web because it pays attention to what you and your friends pay attention to.
Lastly, I really do not think Stuble Upon is a similar tool to any of the other you reviewed. It is close to Digg, which has a very different use and value to people who use it. It is comparing apples and oranges, from everything I have seen from it.
Great article, I love looking at reviews like this to see how this area of web applications is growing. I am a fan of Ma.gnolia for Social Bookmarking. Ma.gnolia should have a check for import, it lets you import from Del.icio.us and from browser bookmarks.
I think what really sets Ma.gnolia apart is the focus on the social aspects of bookmarking. The groups are excellent, and include link blog functionality (with Technorati integration), avatars, and the new discussion feature. The discussions allow group members to partake in threaded discussions about pretty much any topic. A nice Discussions portal lets you find new discussions, and in turn find new groups to join. The MirrorAPI has been mentioned, but is a nice feature. Yesterday a new feature, Ma.gnolia Roots, was released which allows you to look at all of the great metadata about pages without leaving the page you are viewing.
Thanks again for the article.
i use netvouz and its better than anything out there to bad its not as popular as delicous you guys are missing out.
I'm a SiteJot man myself. I prefer the simplicity of the layout to the extra features.
agree with StumbleUpon..
Could you further explain your methodology? When I search for cnn.com I get 22,974 results on MyWeb and for go2web20.net I get 97 results. Neither of which match the numbers you have in your analysis. Also, MyWeb has Contacts. On Delicious for cnn.com I see 10,673 and 1 for go2web20.net. So the CNN number is similar to yours but the go2web20 one is quite different.
Thanks!
Great post. I'm surprised you didn't have a column for what I've found to be the most important feature - full text search over your bookmarked pages. It's what got me to switch from del.icio.us to Yahoo MyWeb. While I don't love MyWeb and the toolbar can be painful in a corporate environment, I still found that: eLearning Technology: Yahoo MyWeb better than del.icio.us, rollyo, et.al. for Personal / Group Learning
Great post Alex. I have always found Yahoo's My Web to be oriented towards the "non-techie" community and therefore purposely lacking many features that might make it complicated. I use del.ici.ous myself, but find it frustrating at times as they dont' allow tagging of multiple words and their bundle concept still needs some work.
Yeah, I count as 17 users on del.icio.us.
Thanks for evereone's comments, will redigest and update the post, hopefully tonight / tomorrow.
Regading including verticals, we might do a separate post on them, but certainly will do social shopping, social news, etc, separately.
Alex
My last bookmark in del.icio.us was for a new social bookmarking site called BlueDot. That was over a month ago. I haven't been back because I freakin LOVE BlueDot! The experience is so much better than del.icio.us. I know it's yet another app in an already crowded space, but I hope they get some traction because I think they've designed a wonderful product for users. http://bluedot.us/
Sam,
The method is to only count direct links to www.cnn.com url not subpages. Also, the numbers might have changed already, hopefully not significantly. Hope this helps.
Alex
I'm an avid user of social bookmarking. I’ve practically tried them all - these social bookmarking services pretty much have the same features. I am glad to see Diigo on your list. It really stands out and offers features like full-text search, highlight and annotation on the page, bookmarking-with-tagging quickly without waiting for an interface to load (big plus!) – serious information consumers will appreciate these power features.
Diiog also makes it very easy to integrate with other services. So it’s really the best one stop solution to allow you to simultaneously bookmark and continue to use whatever services you have been using, while taking advantage of its unique features.
There are a lot of nice resources out there, but very few tools I can't live without. Diigo is one that I can perform so many useful tasks in one convenient central location.
Alex:
Nicely done.
Comments regarding Simpy:
- RSS: Simpy has RSS for most/all(?) search results. For example: http://www.simpy.com/rss/links/search/digg
- Browser add-on: Simpy has a Firefox extension:
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/2465/
It also has a search plugin for Firefox:
http://www.simpy.com/simpy/BrowserPlugins.do
- I'd like to see user estimates for Simpy. My guess is you didn't include that in the table because the search for a URL is not obvious.
Here is a search for all cnn.com URLs:
http://www.simpy.com/links/search/site%253Acnn.com
(gives 616 results currently)
Here is a search for all bookmarks of http://www.cnn.com/
http://www.simpy.com/link/info/http://www.cnn.com/
(gives 302 results currently + 10 without trailing slash)
I hope you can update your summary, it's nicely done.
Very good reading, in both the post and the comments here. I'm Ma.gnolia's product manager, and originally was going to point out that we do have importing, but Sean already mentioned it above. Importing was probably missed since it's available to registered members only, and we'll fix the visibility of that.
I think the member estimation is way off, though, at least in its result for Ma.gnolia. Like others, we don't want to get into numbers games by advertising signup counts, but the sample used here is off, or it's just the kind of thing that can't be reliably answered by sampling like this.
Like I say, though, the rest of the comparison and the comments are great reading! Thanks for posting this.
Missing Spurl (www.spurl.net)
Hi there,
Congratulations Alex, nice research and analysis.
Although, you might try a follow-up article on this one, in which you could measure usage/popularity of these social bookmarking sites by getting the number of users on each who bookmarked this article.
Regards,
Zoltan
One of the things that interest me is how social bookmarking apps, or aggregators, try to (or don't try to) control the out-bound traffic from their app.
I wrote a bit about it here:
http://www.sparkplug9.com/bizhack/index.php/2006/09/16/
the-window-hijackers-how-aggregators-dont-share-the-love/
I had no idea that Stumble-Upon was so big, though.
Alex,
Great article, but I have to agree with one of the previous commenters. While stumbleupon may be a bookmarking service, it is radically different than del.icio.us, Yahoo myweb, Magnolia and others. From my perspective, while del.icio.us serves people who want a place to store, share with others, and easily reference their bookmarks, stumbleupon is almost exclusively focused on the discovery of random urls influenced by users choices of interests in their profiles. I don't think anybody using stumbleupon is using the site to store their bookmarks and reference them later on. They are using it strictly for randomly jumping from site to site, maybe sharing a link with friends and browsing other users who have also given a 'I like it!" rating to websites they link. I would say that all of the other websites you reviewed are attemtping to duplicate the del.icio.us model, while stumbleupon is in a category by itself, somewhat like a 'myspace' of social bookmarking sites, if you will. Anyway, personally, I use spurl.net to bookmark and store my favorite links and it automatically copies those links to my del.icio.us account as a backup. Pretty good tie-in service to del.icio.us and one that I think you should have taken a look at.
Also check the http://populair.eu for some more bookmarking sitez.
Thanks for picking up on Furl.net. I'm the CTO at LookSmart, and just wanted to point out http://furl.net/furlFeatures.jsp is a page that summarizes all of Furl's features in one easy location, including the ability to import bookmarks, see related and recommended items, and share with friends. You might also be interested in the similar list from Jan. 2006 at http://www.roxomatic.de/archives/985/
Social-bookmarks-review-version-3.5/social-bookmarks-review-version-35
Zoltan,
What a nice idea! Might augment the article with the third chart in a few days.
Alex
Why I use MyWeb is because it stores a cached copy of the actual web page and not just the link, I am saving. That is more important to me than the social aspect and why I started using it in the first place. That is why I don't understand why delicious is more popular; it does not store a cached copy of the web page does it, or have I missed that feature when I tried delicious? Since web sites can change location or even be discontinued at any time I like knowing I have a copy of the page and I don't have to clutter up my own hard drive. Frankly, I could care less about the social part of these sites.
StumbleUpon seems to be so far out in front of the 'actual' #1 social bookmark site (del.icio.us) because this isn't a true apples to apples comparison. See comment #43.
Good article otherwise. Thanks much.
Wink Beta 2 is Live!
Check it out: http://techaddress.wordpress.com/2006/09/19/wink-beta-2-is-live/
Hi Alex,
One more important correction regarding the BlinkList data. The links for www.cnn.com/ are 568. On BlinkList, the default blinks add the forward slash so that is why the number is way higher. Without the forward slash it is 31 (instead of 16).
Since you are using this data to estimate the potential size of BlinkList I just wanted to let you know since the real data point would get you closer to our actual size. ;)
1 2 Next