If bookmarking is about saving and sharing useful information for future lookup, lifestreaming is about saving and sharing all information. Lifestreaming is something like automatic bookmarking of everything you do. "Lifestreaming is the perfect supplement to social bookmarking, therefore the acquisition has strategic implications for Mister Wong," said Mister Wong founder Kai Tietjen in a press release.

The first step in integration between the two sites will be a localized German version of Lifestream.fm. The full addition of lifestreaming to the Mister Wong bookmarking services is planned, however.

The paper, which is entitled, "Can Social Bookmarking Improve Web Search?," was presented at the First ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM'08) and includes eleven experiments designed to evaluate "different aspects of social bookmarking and their impact on web search," using del.icio.us bookmarking data, Yahoo! and AOL search data, and ODP data gathered between May and June of 2007.

Overall, the group concluded that the relatively small size of the social bookmarking community (the paper's authors estimate that only about 1/1000th of the web has been bookmarked and tagged in del.icio.us) means that it is not yet ready to make a significant impact on search, but that ther are still ways in which social bookmarking data can be used to improve how search engines work. That's a similar conclusion to one we made in December when we noted that del.icio.us is mostly being used to bookmark stories related to a few narrow fields, which means that its usefulness in augmenting search rankings is limited.

One of the commenters on that post theorized that the reason social bookmarking isn't being used as much for cataloging things like celebrity gossip or sports news is because social bookmarking is used mainly for storing information that is not time sensitive. "Delicious does not do good at celebrities, sports news & so on because it's meant for what you want to keep over time. Not the latest updates. It's as simple as that to me." (NatC)

That sounds logical, however, the Standford group found that del.icio.us users tend to post pages "that are actively updated or have been recently created" and recommended that search engines could use social bookmarking data to augment or improve their crawl schedules. In fact, about 25% of URLs entered into del.icio.us are not seen in search engines for another 4 weeks to to 6 months, which indicates, says the researchers, that social bookmarking could be used "as a (small) data source for new web pages and to help crawl ordering."

What we're most interested in, though is how social bookmarking can be used to affect search engine rankings. The Stanford team found that tagging at social bookmarking sites would probably not be very helpful because 80% of tags are found in page text or the surrounding text and so those pages would likely be found by search engines anyway. The team also found, though, that del.icio.us has a high level of redundancy for about 20% of URLs, and that there is generally an adequate level of overlap between top search results and bookmarked pages. While the paper doesn't make any conclusions regarding the relevancy of URLs that are tagged more than once, it has long been our contention that the number of times a URL has been saved, in conjunction with tag data for that URL, could be used by search engines to augment ranking algorithms -- i.e., URLs that are saved more (or more often) are likely to be more useful.

Certainly there are problems with relying too heavily on how many times a URL has been saved to social bookmarking sites when determining its search result position. For example, that number may be easily gamed or influenced via blackhat techniques. But even without that use case, the researchers at Stanford outlined a number of ways in which social bookmarking sites could be used to theoretically improve search engines, if not yet on a grand scale.

What do you think? Will social bookmarking data ever be used to enhance search engines? Should it? Let us know in the comments below.

Smub, which stands for "smart multi-use bookmarking," requires only that users type "smub.it/" to the left of the URL they wish to bookmark or share. Then, whether it's viewed on a mobile device or a computer, the browser goes to Smub's ten-button interface where users are presented with a modest but functional selection of link-sharing options. The service effectively eliminates the need for copy/paste functions and takes a few steps out of iPhone users' sharing process.

Todd Montgomery, Smub's Marketing and Business Development VP, spoke with us Sunday afternoon, saying, "I know particularly people who tweet do it frequently. Unless you're registered on Smub, it still requires you to log in to third-party services each time you share a link. This is something we're working on for the future."

Other long-term plans include allowing users to define and add other sharing/bookmarking sites outside of the initial nine.

Montgomery and the rest of the Smub team don't see the service as a stop-gap solution until smart phones get smarter, and they plan to add value across web and mobile interfaces. In addition to allowing users to export their content, he said, "We're also coming up with a list function. Instead of having to bookmark each link, you can create a list. Now, your friends will only have to go to one destination to see all the associated links," a function the Smub team thinks will be especially useful for academics and researchers.

Although their initial core focus is on the iPhone, Smub will be optimizing the user interface for Blackberries and other smart phones, as well.

After installing a small Firefox plugin, Facette adds two icons to your status bar - one for bookmarking new pages and one for accessing your bookmarks. The Facette site itself presents both the standard, tag-based view of your bookmarks and Facette's own, more structured data. Because Facette sits on top of Delicious, all your Facette bookmarks are automatically also available on your default Delicious page. Indeed, Facette works by creating a number of new tags in your Delicious library.

Being a research project, Facette is still a little bit rough around the edges, but it looks like a great way to keep your Delicious library more organized - especially when you are using Delicious to keep track of a larger research project. If you decide to use Facette, the developers also request that you sign up for a user study on the homepage, though this is completely optional.

When we first reviewed Qitera, we already liked it a lot. Qitera's main emphasis is on creating a search engine for your bookmarks, no matter whether the bookmarked sites were on the public Internet or hidden behind the paywall of a for-profit database. Qitera is a very capable social bookmarking site with all the standard features you would expect, but what really sets it apart from its closest competitors is its search functionality.

Search Engine Integration

Whenever you do a search on Google or Yahoo after installing or updating the Qitera plugin, the top three search results from your bookmarks will automatically appear at the top of the search results. These results will include your own bookmarks, as well as bookmarks from your friends and colleagues on Qitera.

As Qitera's Joerg Lamprecht points out in the announcement, we often search for the same things over and over again (and so do our friends). By first displaying search results from sites that you have already bookmarked before showing results from the Internet, you can break this cycle and get faster access to a set of search results that you have already marked as relevant by bookmarking them in the first place.

From a business perspective, this integration with Google and Yahoo also makes perfect sense for the company. By seeing the Qitera bookmarks every time you search, you are far more likely to return to Qitera and make it the default app for your bookmarks.

Last month, Qitera also released a better integration with Yahoo's delicious. You can now import your delicious bookmarks to Qitera, though sadly, this is only a one-way street so far. We would also like to see the possibility to sync your Qitera bookmarks back to delicious.

In the last two months, Qitera has also addressed a few of the other problems that we discovered when we first tested the site. You can now, for example, get an RSS feed with the latest updates from your social network on Qitera, and the service now also finally recognizes duplicates.

Coming Soon: Qitera for the Enterprise

Qitera has also announced that it is developing an enterprise version of its service, which it will be launching at Cebit in March.

First of Its Kind?

We think this integration with Google and Yahoo is a great step forward for Qitera, and we are not aware of any other social bookmarking service that has created a similar plugin. If you haven't tried Qitera, we definitely think it is worth a try.

For a more in-depth look at all of Qitera's features, please refer to our review of the service from last December.

The emphasis of the application is on its ability to search the full text of your bookmarked sites, even if those were originally hidden behind paywalls or if you had to log in to the site. This is great if you want to save bookmarks for research, or even if you just want to keep a copy of a social network profile.

Features

In Qitera, you can organize your bookmarks around 'topics.' These topics can also be shared with your contacts on Qitera, though it doesn't seem like Qitera allows for collaborative bookmarking.

You can also see an Iterasi-like live copy of your bookmarked site, though Qitera sadly doesn't recognize when you save the same page twice.

Among Qitera's other interesting features are a Cover Flow-like view of your screenshots, the ability to rate other users' shared items, and a news feed with updates from all your contacts.

Qitera works with every browser. Firefox users can install a small extension, while IE, Safari, or Chrome users get a bookmarklet with the same functionality.

What's Missing?

One feature we are missing from Qitera is the ability to share a certain topic directly on the web. While Qitera is currently a great private research tool, being able to share your topics publically would be also be very useful.

It would also be nice if you could share items not just with other Qitera users, but also with your friends on FriendFeed, Twitter, or Facebook. While Qitera allows you to bookmark and search sites hidden behind paywalls, the site itself does feel a bit like a walled garden (which, for a lot of users, may not even be a bad thing).

Verdict

At first, we were skeptical about yet another social bookmarking tool, but after testing it for a while, we can see how Qitera can be a highly useful research tool - especially thanks to its ability to bookmark and search pages from the 'deep web.' Instead of just having to rely on tags, you can now create small, custom search engines for all of your bookmarks.

The highlight of the new version is recommendations. The new Diigo offers a number of social networking type features that in-and-of themselves aren't worth a lot to me, but if they can do some number crunching and recommend people and content that I may want to subscribe to - that's gold.

What's the biggest crime committed by Del.icio.us? It's not leveraging the huge amount of data the service holds for some recommendations. Why on earth, in this data-centric era, isn't every social bookmarking service making bookmarking social and smart? If Yahoo! held an Amazon-style contest for recommendation algorithms that could be run against Del.icio.us, they could set up a Yahoo! News style page that was personalized like nobody's business. We'd all come back daily to read Del.icio.us, they could run ads up the wazoo and everyone would be beside themselves with happiness.

Instead we'll have to look to a pre-acquisition startup with neither network effect nor scaling problems. Diigo has potential to change the social bookmarking game just because they are offering recommendations. The recommendations aren't even very good yet because there's very few people using the service and the algorithm appears quite simple. I imported several hundred bookmarks from Ma.gnolia and perhaps Diigo will think deeper thoughts about my history after a few hours. I'm not so sure, though. It's still worth a look because it has so much potential.

You might also like the annotation features, though in all likelihood they will prove more trouble than they are worth unless you're an academic. You can associate an OpenID account with your Diigo account now, too. That's good.

Trust

Checking out Diigo could be pretty pain-free. The service does a good job of importing your bookmarks from elsewhere and allows you to publish simultaneously to your account at Del.ico.us, Ma.gnolia or Simpy. If, that is, you are willing to trust the Diigo people with the password to your usual social bookmarking account. Doesn't Ma.gnolia at least have oAuth support so I don't have to do that? Discussion about user authentication protocols as part of data portability seem common enough by now that it's outright offensive to be asked for your password to another web app. If you can deal with that, then there's no reason not to give Diigo a try.

Check out Diigo for yourself, it could be just what you're looking for. It's getting closer to something I can imagine using regularly and really appreciating - but it's not there yet. I'll keep an eye on the recommendations feature because if that ends up working out well, it would be reason enough to switch to Diigo.

Monetizing a Button

The AddThis platform, which we also use here on RWW, should be a good fit for Clearspring, though it is not quite clear how Clearspring could monetize the service.

For users, AddThis is simply a convenient way to share and bookmark interesting sites. The problem with this, of course, is that a bookmarking button is extremely hard to monetize. Unlike some of its competitors like delicious or ma.gnolia, AddThis is not a destination site for most of its users, but simply a feature provided by the publisher.

Clearspring is clearly looking to expand its audience, but, as Josh Catone points out, it also gives Clearspring access to an enormous vault of data about sharing on the net, which it could use to build an advertising and marketing platform. Over time, it will be interesting to see how Clearspring plans to integrate these two products.

Vi.sualize.us is a great social bookmarking service for images. You can think of it as the Delicious for images. A place where the cool photos hang out. If you head to their homepage, you'll see a ton of great images that users of the service have recently added. From fashion to architecture, you'll have a blast going through the archives of users on vi.sualize.us. We recommend using their Firefox plugin to bookmark images whenever you'd like by simply right-clicking on an image to save it. You can also embed your latest bookmarked images on your blog or subscribe to a friend's RSS feed for vi.sualize.us.

FFFFOUND!

Ffffound! was one of the first image bookmarking services to hit the scene. With a fantastic selection of images to browse through, the only downside to this service is that it's invitation only. A bookmarklet and IE extension are provided to make it easier for users to bookmark images to their Ffffound account. A neat twist that this service has is that the more images you bookmark, the more the service will recommend personalized images for your viewing pleasure for a more dynamic experience.

We Heart It

We Heart It appears to be more of a Ffffound! clone with a better user interface. Still, the service is pretty appealing with great images, social tagging, and commenting, which Ffffound! happens to lacks. We Heart It provides a bookmarklet for saving images and videos from Vimeo or Youtube. However, this bookmarklet does not work in IE.

Bookmarking Taken to the Next Level

Bookmarking is going further than we might have originally expected. We can now bookmark images, links, save webpages just the way we found them and tons more. I'd love to see these sites incorporate the ability to upload photos that we take from our cellphones. After all, those are images too. Let us know what you think the next step for bookmarking will be. With We Heart It's ability to bookmark videos, what will we see next?

As with FFFFOUND, items are tagged as being liked via a browser bookmarklet (which does not work in IE, by the way). However, where FFFFOUND focuses only on image bookmarking, We Heart IT allows you to mark videos from Vimeo or YouTube as well.

After you "heart" a video or picture, you can then tag it with keywords and even leave comments about why you liked it - features that FFFOUND does not offer. Images can be marked as "unsafe" and you can choose in your settings whether or not you want to see the more risque images.

Although at first, We Heart It did not display related images like FFFFOUND did, they recently added this feature which allows you find "similar entries" based on that photo's tags. However, unlike FFFFOUND, these related images do not display on the homepage and are only available if you click "Explore" to access the page for the picture that you are viewing. Even then, not all images seem to have related items, whereas at FFFFOUND, they all do. This is because We Heart It finds related items by their tags, where FFFFOUND sources words from the web site where the picture was saved from to give you its suggestions.

The images you tag at We Heart It are saved on a page called "my heart", which has its own RSS feed. This way, as you find people whose saved images you like, you'll be able to subscribe to their latest additions.

We Heart It offers a simple service but they do it well, so if you're also tired of waiting for your FFFFOUND invite, you may want to give them a shot.

But now, that's all changing...or so they say. The company has basically scrapped their original concept in a revamp that's more of a "makeunder" than it is a "makeover." The new Secondbrain focuses on making bookmarking simpler while ditching most of the service's other features.

What's Gone from Secondbrain

Regular Secondbrain users will have to deal with the most dramatic fallout from this switch, starting with the fact that some of their content has gone missing. Imported content like pictures, videos, bookmarks, etc. from other social media services no longer exists in the new Secondbrain. Only content imported manually or with the Secondbrain bookmarklet remains.

The new Secondbrain also no longer does social media synchronization or importing of Delicious bookmarks. These are temporary limitations as the company decides on how to reintroduce these features in a more user-friendly way. For now, Delicious bookmarks can only be imported manually by browsing for and selecting your exported bookmark file generated by Delicious for import into the service.

Also gone is the lifestreaming-like feature which let you follow other users and all the content they were sharing. Perhaps realizing that sites like Facebook and FriendFeed dominate in this area, Secondbrain has decided to switch this option off, now allowing you to follow specific collections only. These collections are sets of aggregated content (blog posts, photos, videos) on a particular subject. Here are some popular collections to give you an idea. All content added to Secondbrain has to go into a collection now, but it no longer has to be tagged - that has become an optional feature.

If you choose to use this part of the service, Secondbrain almost becomes an alternative RSS reader of sorts, pulling in filtered lists of "best of" content on topics you care about. Even better, you can just grab the RSS feeds for the collections themselves (a feature added last week) and pull them into your preferred feed reader instead.

Is It Worth Revisiting?

Overall, the new service may appeal to those who are still actively using social bookmarking and unlike similar sites like Delicious or Diigo, you don't follow people, you follow specific sets of content people create. (Diigo's "groups" feature would be the best comparison).

Still, the bigger question about the new Secondbrain isn't whether or not the new simplified service will appeal, but whether or not social bookmarking is even all that hot of a service anymore. It almost seems as if social bookmarking was just a pre-cursor to the social media sharing types of services we use today, like Twitter or Facebook. Because, really, if you want to casually share a link with your friends, what services do you turn to these days?

Social bookmarking still makes sense in some cases - like organizing research, sharing all the links discussed in a podcast, or compiling topic-based resource guides. In those niches, Secondbrain could still have a shot at staying afloat, but their real shot at glory may have already come and gone.

According to Microsoft, Thumbtack was developed based on user feedback the company received after releasing Listas in 2007. Unlike Listas, however, Thumbtack does not focus on social bookmarking but rather on creating online research collections. Thumbtack supports both IE7 and Firefox, though Firefox users miss out an a few interesting features.

One major disappointment of Thumbtack is its bookmarklet. While its concept of saving a full text copy of a site is great in theory (though not novel), the bookmarklet manages to mangle the text of the page with JavaScript and doesn't copy videos and images. The bookmarklet expects you to highlight the part of the text you want to save, though even then, you can't actually scroll through the text in the bookmarklet. One nice features, though, is that can also just copy and paste items into Thumbtack right from your web browser (or any other program, for that matter).

The actual Thumbtack site, however, is quite well designed and allows you to drag and drop items to different collections, edit and tag bookmarks, and share your bookmarks by email and through a public web site.

None of these features are novel, but the interface does make using the site very easy. One cool feature of the site is the 'gadget' view, which allows you to quickly plot addresses from all your collections on a map, or to create plots based on data in your bookmarks.

It is important to know, though, that Thumbtack is clearly still an alpha product. Sometimes, for example, the bookmarklet wouldn't recognize new collections we had created or published collections wouldn't appear on their respective public websites. That, however, is something we expect in an alpha product and can be easily remedied by Microsoft.

<a href="http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-US&playlist=videoByUuids:uuids:6a905d98-0332-4c3f-8b25-75737cd9b675&showPlaylist=true&from=shared" target="_new" title="Thumbtack Introduction">Video: Thumbtack Introduction</a>

Better Alternatives

Earlier this week, we looked at Qitera, which has a feature set that is quite similar to Thumbtack's, but while Thumbtack has a more interesting user interface, the actual bookmarking and information retrieval through Qitera is far superior to Microsoft's product. Thumbtack also lacks any of the social bookmarking aspects that make Twine, Delicious, or Qitera interesting. Not everybody, of course, is interested in sharing bookmarks, and for those users, Thumbtack is definitely worth trying, though currently, we would recommend Qitera, Delicious, or Ma.gnolia, or the Google Notebook, over Thumbtack.

It would appear that the latter has not changed much over the past seven months. Yesterday, Yahoo! released the top 10 del.icio.us tags for 2007, and with they exception of "music" at #4 and "travel" a #8, they are exclusively related to technology (with slight license taken to include "photography" and "games" in with the tech crowd). Below is the full list:

1. Design
2. HDTV
3. Games
4. Music
5. Web 2.0
6. Video
7. Ubuntu
8. Travel
9. Photography
10. Mac

While the list did include search staples like video, music, and travel, the inclusion of a Linux distribution as the 7th most tagged item of the year is telling: del.icio.us is still not mainstream. Notably absent, of course, are tags about celebrities/gossip, sports, health, and major world news items. Those sort of things, which are massively popular each year among mainstream searchers, need to be present before anyone can seriously start to think about social bookmarking sites as a good basis for a search engine.

Of course, for those who wish to try, you could check out deliGoo (review) or 50 Matches (review).

The new delicious mobile site has a simple interface for seeing your bookmarks and the most popular bookmarks system wide for the day, but it's otherwise extremely limited in functionality.

Browsing with no way to bookmark is like nearly wasted time online, and nowhere is that as true as in a mobile browser. Perhaps Yahoo! should team up with Opera Mini to offer bookmark submission in the browser.

With the new mobile delicious you can see recent bookmarks with a certain tag, but not popular ones. You cannot see who bookmarked a URL, their history, etc. You can put together multiple tags, which is nice, so you can find cooking blogs at m.delicous.com/tag/cooking+blog.

For now we'll stick with our existing solution, pulling the RSS feed of our items marked "to read" into Mobile Netvibes.

How do website readers prefer to share stories they find with friends? According to the company behind the widely used sharing widget ShareThis, after emailing a link, the most popular method of sharing is now Facebook. The numbers are interesting - but there are also some big caveats to keep in mind.

In our enthusiasm for Web 2.0 style tools, many blog publishers may forget just how popular sharing by email is. It's clearly the favorite method. Email sharing does tend to be one to one however, having items shared on Digg or Facebook has the potential to reach many, many more people.

The big surprise here, though, is that Facebook and MySpace have emerged as hugely popular ways to share items from off-site. Have they found greater mainstream success in the relatively short time these sites have supported item sharing than dedicated social bookmarking sites have in the years they have been online? It appears that may be the case.

We found these numbers via Amit Agarwal's blog, which is always a great place to discover new things about the web.

Why This is Important

When publishers add the ShareThis system to their websites, they can choose which services to include buttons for. It's an important detail to take into consideration and knowing which services are most popular can help make this decision. Here at RWW we don't use ShareThis, we use another service called AddThis. Looking at the numbers from ShareThis, though, would lead us to believe that sharing by email needs to be added and sharing by Facebook needs to be given higher billing in our widget. Other sites might make other decisions based on this data. GigaOm, for example, doesn't offer sharing by Facebook at all - something our friend Om might want to change.

Caveats

A few things to take into consideration, however, include the following:

• Your site's audience may vary. Different communities around different content topics probably have different trends in the sharing tools they use. We assume, for example, that there aren't a lot of people sharing ReadWriteWeb stories on MySpace - but maybe we're wrong!
• Some of these services use bookmarklets. These numbers aren't for all sharing, just sharing that goes on through the ShareThis widget. Delicious users, for example, don't necessarily think of what they are doing as sharing (it's often bookmarking for personal use) and that service has its own bookmarklet.

None the less, the take away here for us is this: email, Facebook and MySpace are very popular ways for people to share things online. Publishers neglect them at our own risk.