A quick check has shown that I’ve been using Delicious since November 2006, although my addiction to Google Reader means I’ve never used social bookmarking as heavily as some friends and colleagues. Around two years later, in October 2008, I started using Diigo as my primary social bookmarking tool – not only does it rival Delicious in terms of general features, but it has a handy auto-export for Delicious, meaning that I would always have a duplicate of the 600+ bookmarks I stored since (lately the majority have been saved to auto-feed out to 140char.com)
But although Delicious has been threatened with sale by owner Yahoo, and Diigo has performed faultlessly, all the new innovation and launches in storing and sharing links have either been aggregators for the iPad, or semantic tools which seem to have failed to gain enough internet from people – presumably because such a large percentage of internet users neither know nor care what the hell ‘semantic’ means or can do for them.
So it’s nice that the horror of April Fools Day for an information-obsessed tech fan has been alleviated by news of Freelish.us (h/t/ Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb). It’s a new social bookmarking service based on the existing Status.net alternative to Twitter, which is standards-based, and allows you to either use the hosted service, or install it on your own servers, change the design, and in the future, Status.net installations will have the social bookmarking features as an option.
So you can now also find me as badgergravling on Freelish.us.
It’ll be interesting to see whether there are more possibilities for Freelish.us than with Delicious and Diigo. I’ve never really built huge networks on social bookmarking sites (50 on delicious, 8 on diggo), compared with social networks (3.5k on Twitter, 500+ on FB), and perhaps the mix of bookmarketing and social networking will change that in this case.
The other reason for finding it interesting is whether the ability to install and run Status.net and Freelish.us will come in useful for my own businesses and their clients. Certainly communicating and sharing information within the company firewall is possible with paid and free tools already, but this might also up a middle ground for creating a client service, for example. Either way, it’ll be interesting to watch, and I continue to be an impressed observer of how Status.net operates, including identi.ca.
Comment with your Twitter/Facebook profiles
I’ve finally started upgrading the back end of this blog to start tackling the increasingly important issue of connecting with the discussions posts can prompt in a myriad of places.
Whereas discussion was generally confined to the Comments section in days of old, now it can spring up on Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed etc.
As a commenter, I’ve found Backtype to be useful for aggregating the comments I’ve made, but when it came to starting to tie it all together here, Disqus was an obvious, and easy choice to install and start using.
All of the comments made directly have now been imported into the new system, and I’ve added the ability to post with your Twitter and Facebook usernames, as well as importing discussion around a post from locations like Friendfeed. You can even post a video comment via Seesmic.
I’ve also installed a Disqus widget to show the Top Commenters, Recent Comments and Popular Comments, so you should see that start to hopefully fill out in the next few days in the right side bar.
In addition, I’ve also started combining my saved bookmarks by posting to both Diigo and Delicious, to provide some cloud-based backup and to see which is the best route for publishing any links I want to share – as well as looking at which plugins/widgets might be contributing to long loading times.
All aimed at providing a better service to you, the readers that make all this worthwhile, so let me know if there’s anything you’d suggest, or things you think I should definitely keep or get rid of!