Open social bookmarking service to rival Delicious

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.