Just a few days in to the New Year, and my year has already been made by the discovery of several neat, though possibly longstanding!, interoperability features on a couple of social bookmarking systems that I have been rather neglecting...
In a recent post ("Distributed Socail Bookmarking") I doodled a few thoughts about social bookmarking interoperability.
That post led, in part, to me joining a Social software group on Simpy, with the intention, in part, that we could use that group to track some of the work that is going on in the area of social software interoperability (distributed social software?).
But that's not what this post is about...(it's just for your reference, dear reader, to try and get you to have a look at Simpy if you haven't been over there for a bit :-)
No - what this post is about is the fun I've been having over the last hour synching my del.icio.us bookmarks with other social bookmarking systems, in particular:
One of the features that appealed to me at first was the del.icio.us import facility, which meant I could import all the sites I have bookmarked there, and make them available for search.
One thing I had assumed - but which does not appear to be possible on Wink - was that I would be able to search my bookmarked sites. This would be really handy for rediscovery of resources, of course, as well as providing a Rollyo type service that I've dreamed about here (and implicitly(?! - but not so you'd notice!) here, too).
However, I don't think Wink let's you search your own bookmarked sites, in the same way that Zniff doesn't.
Zniff??? This was doing the rounds some time ago in the blogosphere (e.g. on ) as a human powered search engine (this time powered by Spurl).
What's interesting about Zniff, however, is that you can use it on Spurl to search just your Spurled resources...
And what makes it even better is that Spurl supports the import - and two-way synching (I think - though I have yet to check it out in practice) - of bookmarks with del.icio.us.
Another service that supports synching with del.icio.us (and they're looking for more third party sites to synch with if anyone has any suggestions...) is Simpy. For a long time, Simpy has provided one of the best search interfaces in a social bookmarking system, and now I realise I can use it to search through my bookmarked resources...hmm, I wonder, can I use it to just search those sites I have bookmarked to a particular group, I wonder...? (Does anyone know of a good "Simpy search" tutorial, per chance?)
With Yahoo!'s puchase of del.icio.us (which I really can't be bothered to link to again...) del.icio.us powered searches - perhaps through Yahoo!'s MyWeb 2.0 service (or even Y!Q context sensitive search, somehow (perhaps tag-context sensitive?)) - or Yahoo! powered del.icio.us search - will possibly leapfrog some of the competition...
Posted by ajh59 at January 3, 2006 10:49 PMHere is a good place that describes the power of Simpy's search: http://www.simpy.com/simpy/FAQ.do#search
The 4 questions and answers below it also address search and should be read as one unit.
As for searching Simpy Groups - that is certainly possible. Each Group has a search field right in the middle of the top of the Group page. Everything that you can do with search against your Links or Notes, you can do with Groups. In addition, with Groups you can also make use of the "user" field (e.g. +user:otis +bookmarks)
On Simpy, if I was searching My Links, is there a way I can filter on a Group - for example, +group:"Social software"?
I assume your point, Otis, about the user: filter in a group is that it means I can search over only those links submitted by that particular user to that particular group?
One thing that struck me about the search box at the top right hand of the screen is that when I view another user's links (outside of a group - e.g. when I'm at the Simpy homepage), I get an option in the drop down list to the left of the search query text box offering me a search over that user's links. However, when I view a group's links, the group does not appear as an option in that list...
Also, am I right in thinking I can only search when I am logged in?
Tony, some answers (best asked on simpy-user list, if you are interested):
- +group:... in the top-right search box - no, but that's a good idea, so I might implement it.
- About user:... filtering - the way you understood it is correct, yes! :)
- group search form is in the top-center of each group's page. The top-right search form doesn't search groups.
- link searching is always really available, you just need to use URIs like the search URIs described here: http://blog.simpy.com/blojsom/blog/2005/11/04/Sexy-URIs.html
So you can search any user's links that way, including your own. Of course, since you are incognito when not logged in, even searching of your own links will search only your public links.
Group searching is always available through the grou form.
I hope this helps.
Posted by: Otis Gospodnetic at January 4, 2006 07:03 PM