ReadWriteWeb

The word "bookmark," referring to a saved Web link, is starting to sound old. "Bookmark" has this connotation of turn-of-the-century Web browsers, when there weren't Web-based services for saving things. Your local bookmarks folder was where you kept links you wanted to go back to. These days, we're browsing on multiple devices, and links aren't necessarily "sites," "pages" or "articles" anymore.

Links can point to all kinds of things. Most of the time, we'll probably never need to visit a link again. But there are plenty of links we want to keep, even if it's just to remember them. How do we keep track of saved links? Where do we put them? I talked to Jori Lallo, developer of Grove.io and a link-saving side project called Kippt, to learn about the future of the bookmark.

GitMarks is a command-line based social bookmarking tool built on Git with Python. It's a script that grabs the content from a URL and stores in Git repository where it can be searched with GREP. It features tags and descriptions, and can import bookmarks from Delicious.

It seems like it could be useful for research teams, or to quickly dump lots of content in one place for future text mining.

A common theme of our product innovation series has been exploring applications that take advantage of new devices - and the user experience patterns that evolve out of that. Instapaper is perfect example of this. It started out as a web application, then embraced smart phones, and now it's being used by many iPad owners. In a nutshell, Instapaper is an app that saves web pages for reading later. But unlike older 'web 2.0' social bookmarking services, it doesn't just bookmark a web page. Instapaper saves a copy of the content so it can be read later, offline if need be, within the app.

Instapaper was launched in January 2008 by the co-founder of Tumblr, Marco Arment. In fact Arment has only just gone full-time with Instapaper, announcing last month that he's moving on from Tumblr after 4 years as its lead developer. He has big plans for Instapaper as a business, as you'll discover in this interview.

Online bookmarking tools haven't really changed much over the last few years. Most services still present you with a basic list of tagged links. Pearltrees, however, is taking a radically different approach. The Paris-based company organizes links as a collection of "pearls" that are connected by a mind map-like tree graph. Starting today, you can also embed these collections in your own blog posts.

Google Bookmarks is one of Google's lesser known services. The new star marker in Google Search - which syncs with Google Bookmarks - gave this tool some added exposure, but most users are probably still unaware of this service. Thanks to some new features Google just introduced today, Google Bookmarks may soon become more of a household name, however. Starting today, you can organize your bookmarks into lists (instead of just labeling them) and - more importantly - share these lists publicly and collaborate on creating and editing lists with others.

At this year's LeWeb conference, Pearltrees will launch the beta version of its bookmarking and curation service. In this beta, Pearltrees will introduce some interesting features for Twitter users. Starting Wednesday, Pearltrees users will be able to connect their Twitter accounts to the service. Pearltrees will continuously scan your Twitter account and index every link you share on Twitter. Currently, shared links on Twitter are often quickly forgotten, but thanks to the new Pearltrees connection, you will be able to easily create an archive of all the links you have shared with your friends.

On the Delicious blog today, the social bookmarking site has announced a slew of enhancements in addition to the usual bug fixes for their most recent release.

From their interactive graphs to their iPhone-optimized mobile site to their tracking of who shares what items when, Delicious is showing a deep understanding of where the real-time web is heading and how traffic in this environment works. They're giving users and content creators the tools they need to optimize for this environment. Read on for a complete list of Delicious' new flavors.

When we first looked at Faviki, a social bookmarking application which made its debut last year, we were intrigued by their idea of "semantic tagging." What makes Faviki different from its competitors, services like del.icio.us, Diigo, and the now-defunct Ma.gnolia, is the way the service suggests tags to its users. The suggestions don't come from the community of Faviki users and their tagging history - they come from structured info extracted from the Wikipedia database.

Today, Faviki is releasing an upgrade to their service which will give you even better control over the tagging process, making bookmarking even easier than before. They're also announcing support for OpenID.

Do you remember Faves.com? Don't feel bad if you shook your head "no." This older social bookmarking site formerly called Blue Dot was built way back in 2005, a couple of years after Delicious came on the scene and at a time when social bookmarking was still a hot new trend. After having raised multiple rounds of funding throughout the years, Faves management finally realized they weren't earning enough money to sustain their team of seven developers. In the fall of 2008, they had to lay off all the full time employees. Only months ago, it seemed as if Faves was on its deathbed - no revenue, no employees - it was sure to fold. But now, just at the last minute, the company received a $75,000 angel investment from Geoff Entress and existing backers, not as much as they had received in the past, but enough for them to get off life support and start planning for the future.

Smub.it offers a drop-dead simple social sharing and bookmarking tool that proves especially useful for iPhone and other smart phone users.

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.