Research: Social Bookmarking #2

In my previous post on this subject, my stated next step was to evaluate the bookmarking services below:

1. BlinkList
   Outcome: Not selected
   Reason: Interesting but lacks scale of usage, functional maturity (in Beta), and clear documentation
2. Connotea
   Outcome: Not selected
   Reason: Social bookmarking geared for scientists
3. del.icio.us
   Outcome: Selected
   Reason: met my criteria as well, seems the most mature and well used
4. Furl
   Outcome: Not selected
   Reason: Not really a bookmarking service
5. GiveALink.org
   Outcome: Not selected
   Reason: It’s a research project
6. Jots
   Outcome: Not selected
   Reason: Insufficient scale
7. Linko
   Outcome: Not selected
   Reason: Could not find
8. Shadows
   Outcome: Not selected
   Reason: License agreement seemed to suggest that anything posted became the property of Shadows
9. StumbleUpon
   Outcome: Not selected
   Reason: Uses behaviour to target advertising
10. Web feeds
    Outcome: Not selected
    Reason: functionality
11. Yahoo!‘s My Web
    Outcome: Not selected
    Reason: functionality
12. Zurpy
    Outcome: Not selected
    Reason: Lacks maturity

Now that I have selected a service, my next step is to use it to understand how it works and what I can do with it. However, I have accomplished on task which is to index my blog with categories.

The criteria I used to evaluate the options came down to:

• Functional: does it tag, does it have RSS support, does it allow descriptions; easy to use
• Community: does the service have a wide and large community supporting it (i.e., the network effect)
• Privacy: how much personal information do I have to disclose; can I have private as well as public bookmarks
• Advertising: Am I forced to suffer through layers of ads
• Use in blog: can I link my pages / use the service to categorize content in my site/blog
• Terms & Conditions: are they restrictive or reasonable.