A good example of the differences between what some people call Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 (although not everyone likes those terms, including the guy who invented the web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee) is what has happened to bookmarks. When the Web was first becoming popular in the early 1990s, bookmarks -- or "favourites," as Microsoft calls them -- were an easy way to save a cool site you came across, or a Web page that you went back to often.
Before long, however, many people wound up with lists of hundreds or even thousands of bookmarks, some sorted into folders and others not. And it wasn't easy -- or in some cases even possible -- to move bookmarks from computer to computer, or to get at them when you were somewhere else, or to change and sort them. The Web 2.0 answer to this is "social bookmarking" sites, including services such as del.icio.us, Furl and Simpy.
A social bookmarking site is a place that makes it easy for you to store your bookmarks, and to "tag" pages with keywords to make them easier to sort and find again -- but it also makes it easy to share your bookmarks with others, and to share their bookmarks in turn. In that sense, such sites are very much "social media" in the same way that news-recommendation sites like Digg and Reddit are. Searching a particular keyword brings up your tagged pages, but also any similar pages that others have saved that happen to use the same tags.
One of the best known sites in this group is del.icio.us, if only because it was bought by Web giant Yahoo in December of last year for a rumoured $30-million (U.S.). The site was started by a young man named Joshua Schachter, who ran it on a shoestring as a part-time project while working at Wall Street brokerage firm Morgan Stanley. In 2004, del.icio.us took off and began to grow quickly, and Joshua quit his job and raised some money from investors to grow the company.
There is nothing particularly fancy about del.icio.us, either design-wise or useability-wise. Instead of saving bookmarks in the usual way in your browser, you simply drag a "bookmarklet" or Javascript button to your toolbar (or use a ready-made plugin for Firefox) and click that when you come to a site you want to remember. Clicking the button brings up a small window, with the address and title of the page. You can select some text to save along with it, or just type in some tags and then hit the Save button, and the bookmark is stored.
When you go to the site, you see a list of your bookmarks, sorted by tag or keyword (you can see the words as a "cloud" in which the most used words are larger, or you can see them as a list). You can search through them, or you can search other people's bookmarks as well. And beside each one of your bookmarks, it tells you how many other del.icio.us users also bookmarked the same site. You can also send bookmarks to specific people by tagging them with a "for:person" combination.
Del.icio.us also recently added the ability to create a "network" of friends and fellow social bookmarkers, and provided users with a widget they can publish on their blogs or MySpace pages, so that people can add them to their network or see who else belongs to it. Users can also set up "subscriptions" using certain tags or combinations of keywords, and any bookmarks that other people store which match that description are automatically saved for easy viewing.
In addition to del.icio.us, other popular social-bookmarking tools include Furl (which is part of the Looksmart group of web services) and Simpy. Furl not only stores the bookmark and a "clipping" or selected text from a site, but stores the entire webpage so that you can go back and see what you saved even if the page later disappears (Google has a similar "cached page" feature). Simpy does a full-text search of any stored pages, allows you to attach notes to your saved bookmarks, and also periodically checks your bookmarks to see if the page you saved has disappeared.
Other consumer oriented social-bookmarking tools include BlogMarks, Spurl, Blinklist, Jots and Yahoo's My Web 2.0, while a service called Connotea is aimed primarily at researchers and scientists.
