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.

Jori Lallo: "We didn't actually plan to build a bookmarking service. We made our first prototype service about one and a half years ago over one or two days. It was a quick hack project for an app contest.

"We both bought iPads right when they came out, both me and [Kippt designer] Karri [Saarinen]. We were constantly emailing links to ourselves. So, we just wanted to build a really simple list of links where we could save stuff from the Web and from the iPad's browser.

"It got pretty okay traction for a hack project. After that, we were thinking about how to evolve the service beyond that and how we use these kinds of services."

Beyond the Chore of Tagging

"We both had been opposed to the traditional tagging. I find it to be pretty hard for a user in the sense that you have to create your own topology or map of the tags you use. Tagging is really good for hardcore users, but if you don't [take] the time for tags... I think many Delicious users have been in the situation where you have more tags than you have links. So, we wanted to do things simpler.

"I've found that just plain folders actually work pretty well. That's why we chose lists for the service. When we were building the new iteration of the service, we wanted to approach the problem from the workflow perspective.

"We wanted to build a medium between Instapaper and more heavy bookmarking services, and that's why Kippt is pretty simple at the moment. We're planning to add social sharing features later on, when we have more time. But right now, we're just trying to get the base product right."

What's Wrong With Bookmarking

***RWW:** When you say "medium," do you mean something between a temporary, time-shifting app like Instapaper and a big link taxonomy like the bookmarking services?*

JL: "With 'bookmarking,' it's kind of a disliked term. People have a habit of saving stuff that they don't necessarily go back to anymore. I used to use Delicious quite a lot, but I rarely went back for my links. I guess that's partly because of their tagging system. Also, their search wasn't too good, at least some years ago. I don't know what the situation is nowadays.

"But now, with Kippt, I have lists for projects, like Web development, design inspiration and so on, and I actually go to those lists way more often. I find it a little bit more accessible."

***RWW:** Is Kippt's 'inbox' meant to be a more temporary workspace, then?*

"Inbox, for me, is where I save stuff I need to do later, or I need to process. I don't want to think about the categorization now.

"My girlfriend actually uses Kippt in this way. At the start, she just saved everything in her inbox and just started thinking about the categorization after that, once she had more stuff there."

Link Saving Vs. "Read Later"

***RWW:** What about the 'Read Later' section?*

"We don't want to build a full-featured reading experience within the app, but we still added the 'Read Later' list as a default, because it's a nice place to just put in articles that you can read and from there drag and drop to more permanent lists later on. I find that works pretty well for my personal use cases."

***RWW:** It seems like bookmarking services still have a niche appeal, while dedicated read-later services are catching on. Why do you think that is?*

JL: "I think there has been a trend moving away from bookmarking stuff, probably because Google is pretty good nowadays for finding the things you need. When I've been talking about the app with people, it seems that some people are really into bookmarking, and some people just don't get it at all anymore after the read-later services.

"It's not for everyone, but some people, at least, love bookmarking services a lot."

***RWW:** What is it about those people?*

JL: "I think it's about attention span. Some people, who are really fast, especially entrepreneurs, seem to like the Instapaper kind of approach. This is just my personal stuff I have noticed. I still feel there's a need for more permanent storage.

"Links are more than they used to be in the early 2000s. You have more information about them. And now we have this whole new generation of [richer Web] services."

***RWW:** It's not just static HTML documents anymore.*

JL: Yeah.

Keeping Links Forever

***RWW:** Do you think that keeping Web links forever is something everyone should do? Does the Web work like a bookshelf in your house, where keeping things around, even just for nostalgic purposes, is something people are going to do?*

JL: "I think they're already doing it quite a lot. When we first launched Kippt, we didn't have any kind of importing mechanism, and that was by far the most requested feature."

JL: "Yeah. I think that people have the tendency of wanting to keep their stuff, even though they wouldn't use it, but they still like to keep it. That's the same thing we've seen with [Lallo's other project, hosted IRC chat service] Grove.io. People are saving their IRC logs for years and years. I guess that's the nature of human beings.

"We welcome people to use our service to save links forever, especially if other services don't have good search, and we're improving the search in Kippt. That's one of my top priorities at the moment.

And we're probably going to add some kind of tagging layer on top of the lists because people are asking for it. I think tagging might work pretty well in hashtag form, some kind of way that's more modern. Especially on top of the lists and search, it wouldn't be the main way of categorizing stuff."

***RWW:** So lists are where the links live, but tags are just a way to quickly find them?*

JL: "Yep."

The Browser Vs. "Apps"

***RWW:** Do you think that the browser is a better place to work with links than separate, native apps like Instapaper or Evernote?*

JL: "I actually agree on that, just by experience. We wanted to push Kippt out really quickly. That's why it's so simple. After the launch, we got tons of feedback and feature requests. They mapped out with our plans really well. But one thing I noticed was that no one was asking for the mobile [app] stuff. This kind of service is more important when it's in your browser.

"[Native versus Web] depends on the situation. It's the content that matters. I'm making [Kippt's mobile view] in Javascript, but it's going to be a Web page mostly, not try to mimic native apps. Personally, I hate the mobile Web apps that try to look and feel like iOS apps. In almost every case, they fail pretty miserably."

Play around with Kippt for a few minutes, and you'll see. Bookmarking as a chore is only for hardcore Web librarians, but anyone who uses the Web wants to keep links around for one reason or another. Instapaper and the like are great dedicated reading services, but they're designed around that use, not for storing and retrieving your favorite links.

Kippt just sits as a layer in your Web browser. It's like a bookshelf for keeping and organizing the Web sites and apps you come across. Its two modes are the most useful part; you can save to the inbox for "I'll get to that later," or if you already know what shelf a link belongs on, you can save it straight there. Not everything is an "article" on the Web anymore. Websites are increasingly "stuff." Don't we all need a place to keep our stuff?

Check out Kippt at Kippt.com. You can follow @KipptApp and @JoriLallo on Twitter.

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.

Marco Arment: Yes, that's correct. It's more continuing it as a business, because it's kind of always been one. Just now I have more time to spend on it.

RM: How did you come up with the idea for Instapaper and what was the inspiration for it?

MA: I'd just gotten an iPhone in the fall of '07. I would find things during the workday that I wanted to read, but I was at work - so I really couldn't. I would skim articles [or] I would open a tab and never go back to it, until my browser crashed and then I forgot about it. Or some other non-solution to this problem. [chuckle] And then similarly, I had to commute on the train everyday for about an hour or two. When I was on the train, I had my iPhone and I could browse the internet - but only before it went underground. There were a load of things I had to read.

So I made Instapaper just for myself, really, and didn't even tell anybody about it for about three months after I made it. I just used it myself, just because I wanted something to use to temporarily store those links - so that I could save them at work and read them on the train.

That's how it started and it was very, very basic. In the beginning, there wasn't even a text view. And the reason I got the text view was because mobile Safari [on iPhone] would kick pages out of memory if you load it too much. And so what I was trying to do was load a bunch of pages at once, before the train went underground and before I lost my connectivity for about 25 minutes or so. The text view allowed me to store more than in the mobile browser, because they were much lighter.

Also when I would scroll on the iPhone, I hated if I accidentally lost the alignment in the column I was reading. It would accidentally scroll drag me a little bit and I couldn't scroll it up again. [chuckle] So I made it single-column reading.

I told a couple of friends about it, about three months in, and they loved it. So on January 26th, 2008, I made my initial blog post about it and it just exploded! It was popular very quickly, far past my expectations. I wasn't sure if anybody else would find it useful. [laughter] I figured that I just thought of myself, that it's useful to me but... I was very pleasantly surprised by its reception.

RM: What was the time period between the time that you came up with the idea and when you launched Instapaper in January 2008?

MA: It was about three months.

RM: So it was a very quick development process...

MA: Yeah. I developed the basics of the service in about two nights. It was a very basic service. And I already had a lot of the framework. I already had a lot of that written for other things, including Tumblr. It was in a language I already knew and a framework I already knew. And so I made the entire first draft of the service, I guess you can call it, in about two nights.

How the iPad Version Was Developed

RM: And when did you come up with the iPad version of Instapaper and the idea of integrating that with iPad apps?

MA: I was already doing all these weird mobile Safari apps, so I jumped right on the opportunity to make a real app as soon as it came. I was in the iPhone store on day one, of course. Sorry, actually on day two or three. [chuckle] I tried to be there on day one but missed it. Anyway, so I was in the iPad store right in summer '08 when it launched.

So when the iPad was announced and the SDK for it, I knew I needed an iPad app in addition to the iPhone app. I also decided pretty early on that I would make a universal app which would work on both - preferably optimized interfaces for each one - and that was only half done [at the time the iPad was announced]. The question was really whether I wanted to release that in advance of the launch of the iPad, so it would be there on day one. But I would never have a chance to actually try it on an iPad before submitting it, which is certainly a risk. Or I could wait until after I used an iPad physically and optimize it, then submit it afterward.

I chose to go with the option of having it there on day one [i.e. releasing it before the iPad launched] and taking that risk. And it worked out alright. The first version was functional. It was not pretty, but it worked. And yeah, there were some buttons which were badly placed, the colors were way too bright, the screen was much brighter than I thought it would be. So I made a few tweaks and released an update, a couple of weeks later.

RM: I'm finding the Instapaper app very useful on iPad, for example when I'm using Flipboard and I can save articles I find there to read later on. I like the integration with other apps in the App Store as well.

MA: Thanks. That's been a huge benefit for Instapaper. The first app I ever made was for Tweetie for iPhone. Now, almost every mobile Twitter client and almost every mobile feed reader has a 'Send to Instapaper' feature.

Next Page: Instapaper usage patterns & the future of the product...

RM: What are the main usage patterns that you've noticed so far with Instapaper - and has anything surprised you about how people are using it? Whether on the iPhone, or iPad or even on the web.

MA: Yeah, there have been few surprises. One of the biggest was when I first launched the iPhone app, I thought that it would just be people who are already familiar with the web app - that they'd want the iPhone app to go along with it. Okay, that's pretty much the way I use it. I use the web app first and the iPhone app as an accessory to it. And what surprised me was from the very beginning - and it still holds true today - how many people do both the browsing and the reading on the iPhone. Instapaper is really optimized for browsing on the computer and then reading on the iPhone. But a lot of people just do everything on the iPhone.

Another big surprise was that the iPad has taken off like crazy. At least half of my paid app sales are from the iPad, which given the size of its relative installed base (iPad versus the iPhone), that's a pretty impressive number.

The iPad has proven to be a better device for reading content than even I expected. I had high hopes for it, but I thought it would be about the same for reading as the iPhone. And it ended up that a lot more people find the bigger screen more comfortable. So a lot more people are reading web content on the iPad than on the iPhone.

RM: Yes, that's certainly been my experience. So is the success of the iPad what prompted you to go full time on the business?

MA: Oh sure, that was a huge part. Especially because the iPad sales [of Instapaper] have more than doubled my overall sales since the iPad came out. So it finally gave me enough momentum to take it full time.

RM: Right. And are you hiring other people in the business?

MA: Not at the moment. I do have a contractor who edits the front page editor's picks, also called "Give me something to read." It's the popular, good, long form stories saved by users. So I have a contractor who does that. But otherwise it's just me.

In the future I might hire employees to help out with certain things, but I have no immediate plans to do that.

The Future of Instapaper

RM: Let's discuss the future of the product. Do you plan to expand to other delivery platforms, or are you going to stay focused on iPad and iPhone?

MA: For now, I'm certainly focusing on the iOS platform and also on the Kindle. I really do like the Kindle a lot. It's a much smaller market, but it's a very devoted and very hardcore market - people who really love reading. So right now it's iOS and Kindle. I don't have any immediate plans to support Android or Blackberry, or other mobile platforms directly. But what I'm going to do is make a full feature API, so that other people can write clients for those if they want to.

Right now there are a few Android clients that are unofficial, but because there's no good official API they have just kind of scraped the site to try and make it work. And it's worked with mixed success. So hopefully a real API will encourage better clients to be made.

RM: Will Instapaper add more social sharing and curation features in the near future? [hat-tip Justin Houk for suggesting this question via Twitter]

MA: That's a good question. One thing I do want to do is have better export support for services that will help you with long-time archival. Things like Evernote, Delicious and Pinboard. So I definitely want to add those. I wouldn't really classify any of those, except maybe Delicious, as social though. And Delicious, while it is technically social, I don't think it's really used like that as much anymore - if it ever was. So I want to add features that help people with their own organization.

I also want to add features that help people with information overload management. I don't want Instapaper to just be another bucket for the thousands of items that you have deal with and that you feel obligated and burdened by. That's the last thing I want. So what I really want to do is give people tools to help them manage information overload [so] that it's not a burden, that relieves them of stress rather than adding to it.

Regarding social features, I have a few draft ideas in my head of some kind of sharing features. For the most part they're very, very alpha stage. But even in my head there's something I roughly want to do. It's the kind of feature that before I was doing this full time, which was only two weeks ago, I would never have had the time to do non-essential features like that. Now that I have time to do that sort of thing, I will probably explore those options in the future.

The company, which launched a new beta version of its service last month, notes that these new embeds will give bloggers and journalists the ability to present their readers with a new way to explore a topic in depth. The Flash-based Pearltrees embed opens up new links in an overlay, so readers stay on your site while they are exploring your links.

A tool like this can come in handy when you want to show the research that went into a longer article, for example, or whenever you want to give your readers more background and context than you could pack into a simple list of links in a blog post. Embedding your Pearltrees map is as easy as copying and pasting a short code snipped from the service's embed dialog.

Pearltrees also gives you the ability to share links with other users in real time and to subscribe to other users' collections. This makes it easy to collaborate with others and it also allows you to mash up the research collections of other Pearltrees users.

To get started, simply sign up for an account here. Pearltrees offers plugins for both Firefox and Chrome, as well as a basic bookmarklet that is compatible with all other browsers.

For more details about Pearltrees, also have a look at our in-depth review of the service's features.

If you are not an active Google Bookmarks user already, you can start using the service by starring a few items in your search results on Google Search and Google Maps. These links will then appear on your Google Bookmarks page (note: to see the lists feature, you have to follow this link - the standard Google Bookmarks URL does not feature lists yet).

Features

One nifty new feature is the ability to add items to your lists without having to leave the Bookmarks Lists interface. By clicking on "Add Stuff," you can easily append links, images, videos and local search results to your lists, as well as any Google Docs document. Other features include the ability to rearrange lists through a simple drag and drop interface, the ability to comment on any item in a list and to preview videos, maps and Wikipedia entries directly in the Google Bookmarks interface.

What's Missing? Integration

As is so often that case with Google's products, the lists in Google Bookmarks are a great feature, but while they are nicely integrated with some tools (Google Docs, YouTube, Google Maps), some obvious integrations are still missing. Why, for example, doesn't Google Chrome's bookmark syncing feature work with Google Bookmarks? Using the stars in Google's search engine works well enough, but that same star feature on Google Chrome is linked to Google Docs and not to Google Bookmarks.

Tip of the hat to Alex Chitu at the Google Operating System for being the first to notice this update.

Thanks to the new Twitter feature, which will put all of the links you share on Twitter into a drop box on Pearltrees, you can now easily create a complete archive of all the content you share. You still have to organize this content yourself, however. Pearltrees does not feature auto-tagging.

Also Coming This Week: Real-Time Updates

Starting on Wednesday, Pearltrees will not just allow you to import links from Twitter, but the service will also be able to send out alerts to your Twitter friends when you update your own pearls.

In addition, the company will also introduce a new search feature and updates from other users you follow will be updated in real time. It's important to note that Pearltrees' focus is less on following other users. Instead, Lamothe stressed, the real value of the service is in following the content that others users create on the service.

API Coming Soon

Early next year, the company will introduce an API that will allow developers to access bookmarks and import and export data from other services. The details of this API are still in flux, but will likely allow developers to easily connect other social networks to the service as well.

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.

They've also added interactive graphs for periods more than 24 hours before the current time. Users can highlight an area on the graph and search for results that appeared within that time frame.

Who, What, Where?
A feature we love is the addition of recipient tags to a user's bookmarks. The tags show what bookmarks were sent to a Twitter account or emailed to a friend.

iPhone-Optimized Mobile Site
iPhone users will now get a richer and simpler bookmarking and link-saving experience. Delicious' post reads, "Use your to:read tag and read all those articles you've been meaning to read. Alternatively, see what's popular on the 'Explore' page or search for whatever happens to peak your interest."

Graphs
The graphs seen on search results pages are now also available on URL details pages and in the revamped Tagometer badges, which will now show the number of saved links over time on a graph.

URL Details
Data on links is now available in a much more digestible format, complete with graphs, of course!

Especially for mobile users and those with social media obsessions, this new suite of features seems to be as useful as well as fun to play with.

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.

The biggest upgrade today is Faviki's enhanced tagging interface. In the past, Faviki struggled with some of the tag suggestions pulled out of Wikipedia because they were too long and too hard to enter for practical use. Plus, users wanted to use tags of their own creation, not the tag suggestions.

For example, if someone is tagging an article about the soccer player "Filippo Inzaghi," they may want to tag it by the player's nickname "Pippo." Before, this was not possible. But now, if Faviki doesn't understand a tag, it will pull in possible matches and ask you "What exactly do you mean by ______?" After you pick your selection, Faviki will remember your choice.

This is an important change for the service because it means users can tag web pages any which way they want, but they're still linked to the structured data on the back-end. That way, when someone searches through Faviki's community tags, all the web pages for that particular item or concept will appear, even if people tagged them using their own personal keywords.

Beyond Wikipedia

Another change in Faviki's service is the ability to define new tags. Prior to today, the service was limited to searching Wikipedia for tag suggestions, but now it has the whole web at its fingertips. If a tag is entered which doesn't match anything from Wikipedia, Faviki will search Google for relevant URLs and then ask if the links presented represent the same tag. As multiple users go through this process, Faviki learns what URLs best represent that concept and adds the new tags created by the users to its database.

API, OpenID, and More

Faviki has also just launched a Save/Edit API that provides a way to save and edit bookmarks from other applications. In addition, they've introduced support for OpenID. Other new features arriving today include a smarter autocomplete list, the ability to convert tags, spam control, the ability to export/backup your bookmarks, and a new tag description tooltip.

The only issue we have with Faviki is the same one we had before: there's still no import function available. That means you'll have to leave your extensive bookmark collection behind if you want to use this service. We suppose that it could be difficult to properly tag and match all of our old bookmarks, but without this feature, Faviki doesn't have the best shot at attracting the heaviest users of social bookmarking services.

On the infrequently-updated company blog, the sole remaining employee Mike Koss shared the news about the additional funding, saying it was a "small round" but enough to enable Faves.com to operate for 2+ years, even without increasing the site's revenue.

He also shared some of the plans he has for the new Faves.com, a site that will no longer be solely focused on social bookmarking in the traditional sense, but will try to increase its relevancy in today's era of the social web by allowing for integration with Twitter, Facebook, and other services.

Koss also talked about the Ma.gnolia disaster and, in the spirit of full disclosure, wanted to make sure Faves users understood the status of the service. Specifically, Koss noted that Faves exists in a fairly large-scale data center with four front-end web servers and six back-end database servers. Nightly incremental backups are made as well as weekly complete data snapshots, but no recent full-scale data recovery test has been done. He also said that improving site performance and reliability going forward would be one of the challenges he has to face.

On the one hand, it was refreshing to hear Koss speak honestly about where Faves is now and where it's going, but on the other, it can easily make one feel a little wary of using a service that was only recently gasping for air. That said, as long as Faves.com isn't your primary service for storing your bookmarks, it's probably going to be OK to just enjoy using it as the new social utility it aims to become. Now the question is: will you?

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.

LookSmart acquired Furl in September 2004. At the time, the company announced that it wanted to leverage the data it gathered about users' online behavior through Furl in order to create better search algorithms for web search. Over time, however LookSmart has withdrawn from improving search and the company sold off its FindArticles search engine to CNET in late 2007. Given that Furl is not part of LookSmart's core business anymore, it only makes sense for the company to offload responsibility for the service. We can't help but wonder if LookSmart actually tried to sell Furl but, given the current economic climate, wasn't able to find a partner that wanted to acquire the service directly.

A Good Fit for Diigo

Diigo looks like a good fit for Furl, as it also provides social bookmarking services at the core of its product. Furl at one point looked like it had a bright future ahead of it, but it never really took off. In February 2008, Furl launched a major redesign of its site, which included interesting new features like cached-copy archiving, export in bibliographic formats, and recommendations. According to Diigo, Furl has about one million users - though, as usual, it is hard to say how many of these are active users.

It is not clear how (or if) Diigo will integrate Furl into its own product, but in the announcement, Diigo stresses that it will release version 4.0 of its service soon. Whether this will already feature some integration of Furl's features remains to be seen. For now, Diigo has released a tool that allows Furl users to easily transfer their bookmarks over to Diigo.

Enjoysthin.gs lets you share all kinds of media, from images to videos to quotes to audio you call in and record from your phone. The interface is beautiful and the site is a real joy to use.

The user experience on the site is a real home run; from browsing through the beautifully displayed items from other users to interacting with the site's basic functionality. Creating an account is remarkably smooth and the plush, over-sized displays make us want to jump up and down and clap our hands.

Anyone can tag items, even those saved by other people, and you can view recent shared items globally by tag. Recent activities by your friends are displayed as another item in a big box when you are logged in. There's even an API for integration with outside services; though we dare anyone to try to make a cooler interface, it would be nice to see Enjoysthin.gs on FriendFeed.

There are clearly more features that are still needed, there are no RSS feeds or ways to view the most popular items, for example. Roden is hard at work improving the site, he added 31 new features in December alone. The new feature that lets you call in a voice recording is very cool - a message we recorded was posted to our profile page in just a few minutes.

You can befriend me at Enjoysthin.gs on this page. I'll probably be using the service for at least the next few days. Not because it's particularly popular, secure, supportive of data portability or anything like that - just because it's so damn much fun to use.

For those of you who don't know, Zigtag is another entry in the social bookmarking collection of tools. Like delicious, Diigo, and Ma.gnolia, Zigtag helps you categorize your bookmarks and share them with others. When Zigtag went into development, bookmarking was all the rage. The company's goal was to make bookmarking easier by adding a layer of semantics to the tags themselves.

Zigtag, you see, understands the meaning of the words you assign to a tag. When you tag to a page, Zigtag actually assigns it meaning rather than just a simple word. If that sounds revolutionary...well, that's because it is. Sort of.

Not the Only Semantic Tagging Service

Because of Zigtag's slow progress, they can no longer claim to be the only semantic tagging application available today. Another, Faviki, also offers an intelligent tagging service based on structured data. Both services attempt to address the problem of user-generated tags. That is, even though what you tag "NY" may be the same link that I tagged "New York," no bookmarking service ever knew the tags were related.

Zigtag and Faviki attack this problem in different ways. Faviki suggests tags for you to use, not from a community of users and their tagging history, but from structured information extracted from DBpedia, a community-maintained database created by extracting information from Wikipedia.

Zigtag, however, eschews suggestions and lets you tag items as you wish. It doesn't matter what personal system you use for tagging (one word, two words, underscores, plus signs, etc.) because Zigtag understands the meaning of the tags. In Zigtag, a link tagged "New York" is returned along with other links tagged "New_York." Zigtag also understands that one tag may have different meanings and groups those items accordingly. For example, there's a New York and Company clothing store and a New York in England that may have been tagged "new york." That level of understanding is something that's unique to Zigtag and sets it apart from other bookmarking services.

Thanks to the service's ability to understand meaning, Zigtag users can join groups related a shared interest. Since Zigtag knows what you mean by your tags, it is, in theory, easier to find links you would be interested in on Zigtag than with other bookmarking services.

Is This Really Web 3.0?

Zigtag may be one of the first tools to step out of the Web 2.0 box. Where "Web 2.0" implies there is a social element to a service, it's generally speculated that Web 3.0 will bring about the intelligent web. Zigtag delivers this intelligence, but is it enough?

The only downside to Zigtag is that it requires you, the user, to manually insert the tags. In fact, it even relies on user-generated tagging and has built its entire service around that concept. That may be where Zigtag went wrong. Although two years ago, what it offered was ground-breaking and unique, as we enter 2009, we're asking the question: "Is tagging dead?"

At first, collaborative tagging, also known as a folksonomy, appeared to be the future of the web. It was a rejection of the search engine in favor of the community. It was our collective intelligence harnessed for the purpose of applying meaning and order to the pieces of the web in ways that computer-based tools could not.

As time went on, though, the one thing that made a folksonomy appealing - it was made by people! - was also the very thing that gave it problems. User-generated tags were likely to produce unreliable results. Zigtag addresses that problem, but it does not address what may end up being the true source of failure for folksonomy-based systems: people are lazy.

Now that there are myriads of services using tagging, thanks to the explosion of Web 2.0, we're getting sick of all the manual labor involved. Tag your links, tag your photos, tag your blog entries, tag your RSS feeds, etc.

While at one time, a semantic-based tagging system like Zigtag may have seemed like a vision of Web 3.0, we've now come to a point where we wonder if it does enough. It's possible the next revolution of the web won't be a system that understands the meaning of the tags we created, but knows how we would have tagged things if we had bothered to do so and then does it for us. And if that's not the future of the web...well...perhaps it should be.

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.

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.

There are tons of sites on the web that you want to tag and share with others, but there are also plenty that don't need to be out there for everyone to see. You don't need to socially share the link to your blog's administration page, for example, or the link to your local news and weather site. You certainly don't need to share the links to that weird health ailment you've been googling, either. Or perhaps you want to keep private the research you've been doing for an upcoming article on your blog.

Of course, you could just bookmark these pages using a web 2.0 service and set them to "private," but there's something to be said for having the links close at hand, available in only a couple of clicks from your browser's menu.

The only problem with using a browser's bookmark menu - the problem that the Web 2.0 bookmarking services meant to solve - is that when you have so many links saved, it becomes difficult to find them again. You even start to forget what you have in there. With delicious, Ma.gnolia, etc., this problem was dealt with by tagging favorites with keywords to make them more easily searchable.

Visual Search For Personal Bookmarks

While tagging may work for some, the new service from Tidy Favorites thinks they have a better way - visual search.

We've noticed visual search is a space that's heating up. There are iPhone apps and visual search engines galore. Even Amazon got in the mix with their new "window shopping" storefront.

Now you can take advantage of the power of visual search to browse through your own bookmarks, too. (Yes, we know Ma.gnolia uses thumbnails, but it's not quite the same.)

How Tidy Favorites Works

Tidy Favorites installs like desktop software, but functions as a browser plugin. If anything, it's more like Evernote than it is like a Web 2.0 bookmarking service. 

What makes Tidy Favorites easy to use is its simplicity. To bookmark a page, all you need to do is click the "Plus" button it adds to your browser toolbar. Then, to interact and organize your favorites, you just click the "Star" button.

The Tidy Favorites organizer will appear, pre-loaded with a tab that displays your "Top Links." These are the sites you visit a lot, similar to what both Opera and Google Chrome display when you open a new tab.

Uncategorized bookmarks reside in the Tidy Favorites sidebar, ready to be orgnaized. At the bottom of the dashboard, you can right-click to add a new tab. Then you simply drag and drop links from your sidebar onto that tab's page. The tabs at the bottom are very intuitive to use if, especially if you're familiar with Excel spreadsheets. Within each tab, you can also right-click to add folders to further categorize your favorites.

Other Nifty Features

Besides just organizing bookmarks, Tidy Favorites has a few extra features that make it stand out. One such feature is a cropping tool that lets you slice out a piece of a web page and save that as the visual thumbnail for the site. For example, if you regularly visit a page to see your local forecast, you could slice out the part that just shows the weather, instead of creating a thumbnail of the entire page.

Using this option, you could make a dashboard of at-a-glance information within one of Tidy Favorites' tabs. When you think of all the different ways you could use this tool, you'll realize that this feature could actually be an improvement on using dashboard-like homepages where data comes from pre-designed widgets and RSS feeds.

Tidy Favorites is also portable, so if you want to take your links to go, you can add them to a USB drive.

The Not-So-Good Stuff

One feature of the software that really needs to work well is the built-in search box. Using the search function, you should be able to easily search your bookmarks by entering in a keyword or search term, then click "Google," "Images," or "Wiki" (Wikipedia).  When using the Google option, it will by default search your favorites like a Google Custom Search Engine would. But upon testing this, it wasn't finding some links saved even though I used good keywords. It seemed to be returning Google search results, but it was supposed to be searching the bookmarks only. Obviously, this is a critical feature that still needs some work.

Another big problem is that, unfortunately, this software is currently Windows-only. The page that it displays is saved on your computer itself, as its URL starts with your local IP (127.0.0.1). Why this can't be ported over to Mac or Linux is unknown, but we hope they are working on it.

We'll keep our eye on Tidy Favorites for now. It's still rather new, so we'll let them iron out some of the kinks we saw. They still have minor usability tweaks to make like deleting thumbnails from the sidebar after they're dropped in a tab. We think the bookmarks should automatically arrange themselves on the page, too. If they can fix these problems, we could definitely see this as being a great tool for organizing sites, but it's clear they're not quite there yet. So until then, it's back to Evernote for us.