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Social bookmarking service Delicious has been in the news lately because of Yahoo's controversial plan to "sunset" it, followed by the sale of the company to YouTube co-founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen. Delicious used to face a lot of social bookmarking competition, though. One of the most-hyped competitors, a Seattle company called BlueDot, which later changed its name to Faves.com, quietly announced this afternoon that it will close up shop in a matter of days and put its assets up for sale.

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.

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.

The wake of the Delicious debacle has been very fruitful for a few other services that occupy a similar Web curation space. One that popped up in the comments in our original post on Delicious was Trunk.ly, which sounded promising for not only offering to collect the links users share on social networks, but to make them searchable. Saving a bunch of links on "library school" is one thing, but being able to parse them out and subdivide them by search, that is where the beauty of data curation lies.

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.

Social bookmarking sites like Delicious are useful for collecting bookmarks, but they don't allow users to really draw connections and tell stories. That's where curation-focused services like Pearltrees and Trailmeme come in. Trailmeme, which we first looked at in December, was incubated at Xerox and launches at DEMO this week. It allows users to bookmark sites and then organize them in tidy diagrams, making it easy to highlight the relationship between different items and for readers to browse these links.

Less than a month ago, we told you about how social bookmarking and discovery service StumbleUpon has quietly grown into a Web behemoth, driving nearly twice as much traffic as its closest competitor, Digg. One of the things that makes the service stand out from the others is its ability to learn your habits and tastes to feed you relevant links upon which to stumble. Today, the service is brining the serendipity of its recommendation engine to a smartphone near you with boredom-killing apps for the iPhone and Android.

When we first came across Faviki back in 2008, we were intrigued by the concept of a social bookmarking service built using semantic tagging capabilities. Instead of organizing bookmarks based on user-created tags, Faviki tags come from structured information extracted from Wikipedia. After Faviki's update earlier this year which improved the tagging process and introduced OpenID support, we again wanted to make the move to this semantic web-based service. There was just one thing standing in our way: no bookmark import feature.

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.

Starting today, social bookmarking service StumbleUpon is allowing users to beta test a shiny, happy redesign of their site.

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.

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.

It's not often you hear an application's creators describe their service as "an unmanageable complexity" that "compromised the user experience," but that's exactly what those behind the content aggregation system Secondbrain are admitting right now. Their service, a bookmarking/social-media sharing/lifestreaming/social network kind of tool was hard to describe and even harder to use.

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.