Top 5 Social Bookmarking Websites
Social bookmarking is one of the oldest concepts for internet users to store, manage and organize bookmarks. Since 1996 there have been a number of social bookmarking websites that have gained popularity and enhanced the concept itself. Over the years social bookmarking has led to the creation of well-knit communities of people with similar interest, who regularly share content through various social bookmarking websites. In this post we will take a look at some of the best social bookmarking services that you can use to search, organize, manage and share content.
Delicious
Delicious is one of the oldest social bookmarking services. Users can save, share and discover content according to links bookmarked by “Delicious” users. Being a social bookmarking website, Delicious allows users to add various tags, which makes it easy for other users to search links regarding specific keywords. Bookmarks posted on Delicious are public and can be viewed by anyone, (unless a bookmark is marked as private by a user or imported).
Digg
Mainly dubbed as a social news website, Digg is a website where people share links and are given the opportunity to vote the links that they like (Digg). Diggs (links) can be submitted for various categories including Business, Entertainment, Gaming, Lifestyle, Politics, Science, etc. The submitted links that get the most votes show up on the main page of the website for a specific category.
Reddit is a similar service to Digg, with a few exceptions. Users can create Subreddits (groups) where other users post links or text messages. The posts that get more up votes gain better visibility in each Subreddit. Any user can create a Subreddit, as well as comment and vote on posts submitted by other users. When a user submits a post the votes of the post are added as Karma for the user’s profile, which affects his/her standing in the community. Every up vote results in increase in karma and vice versa.
StumbleUpon
StumbleUpon is a website which acts as a search engine for specific kind of content. Users who sign up at StumbleUpon select the content that they are interested in discovering and are shown relevant links (submitted by StumbleUpon users). For example, if a user has listed fashion and filmmaking among his/her interests, then StumbleUpon will show websites related to the select categories. Whenever a user wishes to submit a link, a drop down menu is given to select a category for the kind of link being submitted. The Stumble option allows discovering new websites related to a selected range of categories.
While some might find it a little confusing to see Twitter in the list of social bookmarking websites, it can be safely said that Twitter offers all features necessary to fit the bill. Twitter is considered to be a micro blogging and social networking website, however the gap between different social media categories is narrowing. Twitter not only allows sharing links, but also provides the option to add hash tags, feeds for shared content, items to a favorite list and create lists related to a category for people to follow. The aforementioned features clearly make Twitter a social bookmarking service (other than being a micro blogging and social networking website). In fact, Twitter can be considered as perhaps one of the most famous social bookmarking website.
As social media websites further evolve, we are likely to see the gap between social bookmarking, social networking, social news and social networking to become thinner. While there are hundreds of social bookmarking websites that could have been included in the above mentioned list, we have tried to provide our readers with the most famous among them all.
