How effective is social bookmark synching? Earlier this week I
posted about the synching services offered by Simpy, Spurl and Wink.
(NB Scuttle will also synch with del.icio.us). Here are a few more thoughts, particularly insofar as they relate to distributed social bookmarking.
First of all, the synching service appears to be a one off - I click the button and the bookmarks are copied across to the service from del.icio.us (typically...).
Now I can understand this mode of operation when I want to sync a service with my browser favourites (not that I use those anymore...) - there's no way that the service can easily grab any bookmarks I've made since the last sync operation from my browser.
But that's not true for the online bookmarking services. Once I've set up a synch-link, it would be handy if I could set up a daily top-up, for example, whereby the service I'm synching into subscribes to my personal RSS feed at the service I'm synching from and grabs all the latest additions and changes.
Why would this be useful? Well, it would let me bookmark in a mixed way, for example using a del.icio.us account for home bookmarking, CiteULike or Connotea for work related links, and so on, whilst still maintaining an meta-archive of all my links.
Suprglu does this for me with my various blog feeds, and I think it would be handy to have a related service for my bookmarks...
I could quite imagine a star based system architecture, whereby one or two major systems will synch from large numbers of minor social bookmarking systems, and perhaps also synch back to them (e.g. I think Wink will update del.icio.us with any (or is that just particularly tagged?) bookmarks I make in Wink).
If the major social bookmarking systems/hubs then synched between each other, we could have quite a fluid(?!), automated transport of links across the systems.
Putting filters in place, so as to only synch certain tags or tag combinations, would allow users to maintain different profiles of themselves on different systems. Being able to set synch frequency, or support pings (both incoming and outgoing), would also be useful.
I've argued before that individuals maintaining more than one social bookmarking persona is not necessarily a bad thing - for example, I desire different tools when making personal bookmarks as compared to academic, work or research related bookmarks; I require different search tools for these different aspects of my online behavior; when recommendation systems start mining my bookmarks I may want to cultivate different personas, and so on.
The growth of lensing applications such as Squidoo or H2O Playlist and personal/customised search applications such as ScoopGO! (do they want Yahoo! to buy them, do you think!?), or Rollyo, as well as the people-powered search engines, suggests that aggregation and synching tools will be useful for those of us who don't just adopt whatever service I use first because it came via my browser's default homepage/bandwidth provides portal.
PS As to what other services should be synched to - Connotea would be handy for me, along with CiteULike which I haven't really used yet, but which is near the top of my 'to play with' list...
Posted by ajh59 at January 6, 2006 10:04 AM