How hyped was this service? It had backing from former Starbucks Senior VP Don Valencia, former Microsoft Senior VP Richard Fade and Mark Zbikowski, creator of the DOS executable file format (.EXE). Michael Arrington chose it over Delicious as a Web service he couldn't live without and Mashable called it the only other Delicious-type service worth writing a positive review of. I reviewed it in great detail five years ago at TechCrunch. For all that enthusiasm, though, smart features and good design couldn't make BlueDot take off with users.

Two years ago Koss blogged that the company had laid off all employees beyond himself and a part time operations person, but had raised enough money to keep trying for 2+ more years. Two years and one month have now passed.

"As we evolve the Faves.com service, we are looking to be more relevant to users who are increasingly adopting Facebook or Twitter as the primary means of communicating with their friends, family, and co-workers," Koss wrote then. "We are also finding that a large proportion of users of our site are not authentic 'bookmarkers', but rather are creating links to other web sites for marketing, or spam."

It's really a shame that social bookmarking hasn't worked out better than it has - the field has such incredible potential for research - but I have to confess that I rarely bookmark things myself anywhere these days, either.

In a brief chat with CEO Tim Bull and CTO Alex Dong they described their vision for Trunk.ly as a "personal search engine." Bull says, "We've got an aggressive roadmap that's basically looking at all the ways you can share links with people - we want Trunk.ly to be there capturing those and storing them so you never lose a link again."

The key difference between Trunk.ly and Delicious is that while tags are still around they are not as central to the service. The links that are imported via your social feeds are indexed inside Trunk.ly, meaning when I recall that I read an article about hamburgers two weeks ago, I can search for "hamburgers" and it'll pop up! In addition to the search function, it also has a social aspect where users can follow one another and search across other user's Trunks.

In comparison to a service like Pinboard, another curation app getting substantial buzz that offers similar features, the added bonus for Trunk.ly is not necessarily having to DO something (push a bookmarlet and add tags or descriptions) for it to grab links. After you connect whatever services you want to curate, Trunk.ly sucks the links in, there for your searching and referencing pleasure.

Trunk.ly actually launched much earlier than planned in response to the vacuum left by the probably loss of Delicious, and as of today, it's currently revamping its service, adding servers and features, to account for the flood of traffic. They have plans to connect with other social services like Digg and StumbleUpon, open their API, and add RSS functionality, Chrome extensions and more. For a project that has only been in the works since October, and one that launched under the gun, these ambitions seem pretty, pretty plausible.

How does Trunk.ly compare with other curation Web apps? What experiences do you want or need from a bookmarking service?

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.

Besides allowing users to create their own trails, they can also browse and search other users' trails. On its front page, Trailmeme highlights those collections that are especially popular among its users.

The company offers a toolbar for Firefox and a universal bookmarklet for creating trails, as well as plugins for WordPress and - in the near future - MediaWiki. Sadly, Trailmeme doesn't currently offer the ability to embed collections on other sites.

A New Kind of Publishing

As Rao told us, the main goal behind Trailmeme is to allow users to "navigate the web via well-curated trails," but given the projects connection to Xerox, it doesn't come as a surprise that there is also a publishing angle to this tool. Trailmeme offers users the ability to print trails and save them as PDF files. As Rao told us, in the long run, the team is also considering to offer publishers the option to monetize their efforts and sell printable version of their trails.

Will Users Care?

Overall, Trailmeme is an interesting tool (though it lacks the visual appeal of Pearltrees and browsing trails often feels a bit sluggish), but it remains to be seen how many users are actually interested in curating their bookmark to the extend that Trailmeme and similar tools expect them to do. For most users, Google has already replaced regular bookmarks to some extend. If done well, however, an expertly curated collection on Trailmeme or Pearltrees can provide a lot more value than a simple list of links on Google or Delicious.

For those unfamiliar with the service, the concept is fairly simple. Simply select a few topics that interest you and StumbleUpon will begin showing you various gems from around the Web. You can rate links with a thumbs up or down or share it with other users and social networks like Facebook and Twitter. And of course at any moment, you can tap the StumbleUpon logo to be whisked away to something new.

Some drawbacks to the app are that it doesn't let you can comment on items, and the built in browser doesn't allow scrolling or movement within a page until it is completely finished loading. This can be extremely annoying when viewing a long scrolling page of photos, but the app does include some options to counter this frustration.

If you're stumbling on-the-go, a setting (which is unfortunately accessible only from the phone's settings menu, not from within the app itself) will allow you to stumble directly to previews. I recommend using the "Current View" setting, which will take you to either full pages or previews based on where you were when you clicked the stumble button.

Sharing to Twitter and Facebook was fairly painless. Twitter's authentication process went faster, but when I posted the tweet the screen didn't go away or provide any sort of confirmation. I had to check my Twitter feed on my desktop to be sure it had posted. While Facebook takes a bit longer to authenticate due to permissions and privacy settings, it posted quickly without confusion.

I have been largely absent from StumbleUpon lately, but the new mobile interface for the service may bring me back. I do wish, however, that Tumblr (my photo sharing service of choice), was an option for sharing from within the app. Saving images to your phone from the built-in browser is not possible, and cropping out the StumbleUpon toolbars is too much work just to get a picture up on Tumblr from your phone. You can, however, simply give items the thumbs-up and view it later on the desktop.

Despite this, the StumbleUpon app could certainly rekindle my interest in the service, and should be a no-brainer download for fans of the service.

Unfortunately, until now, the only way to use Faviki involved abandoning your extensive bookmark collection and starting fresh. Today, things have changed. Faviki has, at long last, added a Delicious import feature.

Delicious Import and Common Tags

With the new semi-automatic Delicious import feature, Faviki users can enter in their Delicious information and the service will import their saved sites. However, before the import is initiated, Faviki displays a list of sites along with suggestions of "Common Tags."

Common Tags are a new open tagging format introduced this year which help eliminate some of the problems inherent in user-generated tagging systems. Prior to common tags, users could create a number of different tags that mean the same thing. For example, "new_york" and "nyc" could both mean the New York, the city. Also, there is the problem of one tag that refers to different things such as "jaguar" the animal and "jaguar" the car. With the new standardized format, tags are linked to concepts complete with metadata and their own URLs. That way, "new_york" and "nyc" would both be known to mean the same thing and an article about an animal tagged "jaguar" would link back to the concept for the animal. The metadata in these "concepts" provides additional information about the item being tagged, too. For example, a tag for "obama" would be linked to a concept which indicates that he's the President of the U.S. and married to Michelle Obama.

After Faviki suggests the appropriate common tags for each link being imported, you can make corrections and suggestions as you see fit. Also, if any of your own Delicious tags don't resolve to a common tag, you don't have to fix that issue before import. Instead, the next time you go to use that particular tag, Faviki will prompt you to define it then.

Automatic Posting to Delicious and Twitter

Another nice feature in today's upgrade is that you can continue to use the Delicious service to complement Faviki. Through automatic posting settings, your bookmarks tagged in Faviki will copy over to Delicious. Not only that, but you can continue to use your Delicious tags, too, once they're mapped to common tags after import. Twitter posting is also supported as of now.

While this update is a relatively minor one, it was a much-needed feature in order to get users to make the big switch from one service to the next. Now that we don't have to abandon our bookmarks - and can even still use Delicious if desired - Faviki looks a lot more appealing.

The new interface is streamlined and more social with an updated relationship system. A focus on consistency (e.g., limiting user control of visual elements) and removal of clutter (e.g., presenting tags in a drop-down menu rather than a cloud) characterize the design changes made. Also, a few tweaks to group sharing were made to help reduce share-spam.

The "Favorites" tab has been renamed "All" and includes every site a user ever liked, including multimedia content. Similarly, the "What's New" page, which displays sites a user's friends and subscriptions reviewed, has been renamed "Recent Activity."

In the new interface, shares are found in the main Discover tab and display the list of sites that were sent to a user by mutual subscribers with direct-share permission. Soon, the site will display sent as well as received shares.

The once-retired Similarity Meter, a diagram showing a users' Favorites similarity with other users, is being resurrected. And by popular demand, group shares will no longer be available in bulk; users will have to select other users within groups to share items with them.

Design changes that limit user choice in favor of overall site consistency are threefold: List view rather than a grid view is the default for all profiles. In contrast to the 22 background colors once available, a mere seven of the most popular color themes are now being offered for profile customization. And the visual editor has been scrapped. "Rest assured," the site reads, "we are still working on making sure all your past blog entries look good in the new interface. Some text customization will still be allowed.

"Our goal is not to limit your creativity, but to place emphasis on content and ensure a consistent user experience." An admirable aim, indeed; we think StumbleUpon is working in a good direction with these changes.

We also admire the new drop-down menu for tags:

Users are able to toggle back and forth between the beta redesign and the old site design over the next month. "To switch back to the old look," the site says, "simply click on the Beta link located on the main navbar (see image below) and on the following screen click the Leave Beta button. To return to the new interface, use the link Click here and try the new StumbleUpon! located at the top of all pages in the old view."

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

To mark its big day, we offer below two videos. The first an introduction to the tool for readers still unfamiliar and the second a screencast demonstrating just how easy and useful it is to make 5 changes to your Delicious experience. Those changes took us under 5 minutes.

We also want to take this opportunity to thank the Delicious team and especially now post-Yahoo founder Joshua Schachter, for making this awesome service what it is. We really appreciate it.

First, an Introduction

Thanks to CommonCraft for another great video.

And Now for Something New

The following video demonstrated five of our favorite ways to use Firefox plug-in Greasemonkey to radically change the Delicious experience. This is really easy to do, as you'll see, and we've included all the links below the video. With just a handful of clicks you can integrate Delicious into sites like Google Reader and Digg, you can sort and view Delicious in brand new ways, and make a number of other changes.

Note that there's no audio in this video, we just went through the steps. We hope that's ok for readers but if you'd prefer it be narrated, let us know.

Links shown in the screencast:

Greasemonkey

Delicious for google reader

Sort by popularity or other

digg.licio.us

subscribe in delicious

Favicious

Autopagerize

The extension lives on the right side of the browser window and can be expanded and closed at any time. Comments can be kept private, or shared with individuals and groups, as well as with the whole ReframeIt community. Once you share a comment, other users can rate it, bookmark it, or share it with other users. On pages with many comments, you can also filter annotations by ratings, number of replies, and shares.

Lots of Social Features

ReframeIt also provides its users with extensive social features on its web site. As has become standard for social sites, you can also 'follow' other users and be notified when they leave comments.

ReframeIt's community is mostly organized around groups. Currently, most of the active groups on the service are clustered around political topics, but the company also envisions school or college classes to use the tool for reading and annotating texts online.

Competition

ReframeIt's closest competitor is clearly Diigo, which has a more extensive feature set and also puts more emphasis on social bookmarking and discovery.

If you are mostly interested in sharing annotations, Reframe It is a perfectly good and easy to use solution, especially if you just want to share those annotations with a relatively small group of friends, colleagues, or classmates. If you need more advanced features, however, Diigo represents a better solution, especially if you consider that ReframeIt only represents a sub-set of Diigo's functionality.

Our main complaint with the service is that the browser extension does not allow you to access your social network and past comments without having to go to ReframeIt's web site.

Overall, however, we were impressed with the user interface design and functionality of both ReframeIt's site and browser extension.

For a quick look at how ReframeIt's interface works, here is the company's introduction video:

For those who already have established communities on reddit, being able to point your own domain to reddit without having to host the open source version of the service yourself is a great step forward. Also, being able to customize your CSS stylesheets gives you the opportunity to make reddit fit into the design of your own brand. This makes using reddit a lot more palatable for those with established names who would like to experiment with social news sites, but shied away from it so far.

Reddit definitely doesn't seem to be afraid of giving up control. In the end, though, this move is only going to help it grow its audience - and while the audience might sometimes not even be aware that they are looking at a custom reddit site, reddit itself will surely run advertising on those sites, so its bottom line is only going to benefit from this.

One thing reddit doesn't allow you to do, though, is to create your own voting algorithm - though judging from the direction the developers have been moving in lately, this is probably only a question of time.

Contest

Also, reddit has announced a contest for those who want to start their own community on reddit. Whoever manages to create the largest sub-reddit within the next month can take away a Macbook Air and a reddit bobblehead.

Reddit Keeps Growing

Reddit also announced that they have seen a 300% increase in subscribers and subscriptions since unveiling their latest redesign in May.

While reddit is still much smaller than Digg or Yahoo Buzz, it is definitely driving the development of its site forward a lot faster, and, at the same time, pushing its competitors to become more open and creative as well. While Digg is trying to keep very tight control over its service, reddit is moving in the opposite direction and judging from the numbers cited in this announcement, it is working out quite well for them.