Segmentation Fault: Core dumped..;-)

SBMSP (Social Bookmarks Management Service Providers): del.icio.us, furl.net, spurl.net…

Posted : January 31, 2005 at 5:18 pm [America/Los_Angeles]

Up until this morning, the only SBMSP that I knew of was del.icio.us. Turns out, there are atleast two more:

furl.net

spurl.net

Frankly, I am not sure we need gazillion SBMSPs. Having said that, the fact is that Spurl.net and Furl.net are providing capabilities (like page caching and fulltext search, see details below) that del.icio.us really should have started providing by now. Ofcourse, I am assuming del.icio.us to be the granddaddy of all SBMSPs.

Anyway, here’s my list of features that I would like SBMSPs to start providing at a bare minimum:

1. Allow you to easily add sites that you like, preferably using bookmarklets or right-click contextual menus (like Bloglines provides for Firefox users). The tool/plugin should atleast support Firefox (and other Mozilla-based Browsers), Safari, Opera and MS Internet Explorer browsers on Linux, Windows and MacOSX.

2. Categorize sites with “Tags”

3. Allow you to see the links that others have collected, as well as show you who else has bookmarked a specific site. Also, allow you to view the links collected by others, and subscribe to the links of people whose lists you find interesting.

4. Be RSS/Atom Feeds friendly. In other words, provide feeds where it makes sense.

5. Maintain a cached copy of the each bookmarked link. To me, this is an extremely critical feature that will go a long way in ensuring that the time you spent on bookmarking the content is not lost if the original article or web site is moved or taken down. In other words, provide a service which helps you build your very own “digital mine” online, dare I say your very own Google type service!. Furl.net and Spurl.net both seem to provide this service.

6. Provide “powerful” search interface. Currently, search capabilities provided by del.icio.us is very limited (not to mention slow) as it only allows you to search for the links based on tags, description (typically title of the page) or content entered in the extended field at the time of posting the link. What would be ideal is if the SBMSP would allow fulltext searching capabilities against the entire content of the page.

7. Evolve the service over time from being a SBMSP into a PKMSP (Personal Knowledge Management Service Provider), as discussed previously in one of my earlier post (GMail is great, but what I am really looking for is myKM service!).

For now, I am going to stick it out with del.icio.us mainly because I like it’s simple interface and the fact that I’ve already started using it and don’t want to migrate my bookmarks over to these other providers. However, I sure hope that the folks behind del.icio.us are thinking along the lines mentioned in the blog entry here.

In the meantime, you can get some of the capabilities mentioned in items #5 and #6 above by marrying del.icio.us with GMail. Nice!

- Anand

Category: Services and Software |