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The assignment du jour seems to be to take a look at three Web 2.0 sites and compare their goals and functionality, based on the article by Bryan Alexander.

(As an aside, I’ve never liked the term ‘Web 2.0′. It seems… strange.)

As such, I’m going to take a look at an aspect that I don’t spend much time on – social bookmarking. Back when del.ico.us first emerged, my friend Jai insisted that I get an account. My interest in it lasted all of a week. While del.ico.us gave me the ability to have a large number of bookmarks accessible at one time, I didn’t care at all about the “social” aspect – what reason have I to share my bookmarks? They’re for my personal use, right? And so I went back to my overcrowded bookmark folder in Mozilla Firefox.

Alexander’s article makes some good points about the functionality and usefulness of sharing bookmarks. IT’s a unique way of networking, you can find out what bookmarks are popular without actually having to ask anyone, it’s easy to use and it’s free. I’m still not keen on sharing my own bookmarks with friends, but I suppose I can see the use of people sharing what bookmarks they, personally, found useful.

As an experiment, I searched for Napoleon on each of these and noted my results and whether or not it’d be useful for a paper on the historical figure; this was mostly for my own curiosity.

First, I’ll look at del.icio.us.

(For the curious, there is my page. It’s rather a blast-from-the-past for me, many of the pages listed no longer exist or are no longer of ANY interest to me whatsoever.)

The interface is fairly streamlined, and rather clean when compared to some other websites I’ve seen. I can also see myself wasting a lot of time here succumbing to what I call Wiki-syndrome – the tendency to follow interesting links and then get sucked into a giant mess of open tabs and irrelevant but highly interesting information.

Napoleon Test Results: The third bookmark down was useful, as was the seventh, but the rest were for the film Napoleon Dynamite. Not exactly helpful for an academic paper. Furthermore, there’s no way to establish the authenticity of the web pages or whether they’d be good for citing as a legitimate source – anyone could have written them, we have only the word of some mysterious person on a bookmarking site.

Shadows.com, unfortunately, seems to have died and disappeared into the aether, replaced by a scammer squatting the URL. That’s unfortunate, as the idea that Alexander presents in his article is an interesting one – it would be nice to have discussion pages on each tag. Perhaps then one could see based on the comments if the page in question was, say, good for research or just a silly Napoleon Dynamite related page. However, such a thing might only work in principle, not in practice – behold YouTube.com comments, which tend to be inane and completely unhelpful (“lol that’s a gud movie dood”). More likely one would just get long strings of identical “That’s a good link” comments instead of any actually helpful information.

Raw Sugar also seems to have changed in function since the writing of Alexander’s article – whatever it is, it’s no longer a bookmarking site. The idea presented in the article is that in addition to social bookmarking, one can also have a user profile and other blog-like features. While this is a nice little widget, it seems supurflous – websites like Facebook exist for those features, which may be why the site is no longer a social bookmarking site.

Del.icio.us seems to have won out here – the other competitors mentioned by Alexander don’t seem to exist anymore, and the Wikipedia list has shrunk from the 40+ cited in the article to 27. Clearly, the novelty of social bookmarking has worn off somewhat. And even if the other websites existed, del.icio.us seems to have the most simple functionality – comments would be largely useless in the end, and profiles are superfluous. Simple, streamlined, and functional are the words of the day here, and thus it is that del.icio.us is the only surviving site out of the three mentioned by Alexander in his article.

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~ by bjtope on January 27, 2009.