Once you’ve signed up, bookmarks can be added via the website or (much more conveniently) via Firefox and Chrome extensions, as shown in the screenshot above. These add-ons are a bit fiddly; you must be signed in for the Chrome add-on to work, while the button for the Firefox add-on is hidden down at the bottom-right of the window. It also took me a while to figure out how to clip content from a web page.

Once saved, pages can be tagged, shared with contacts and made public (note: this effectively publishes a public cache of the page you’ve saved; there may be copyright implications in using this feature). Editing bookmarks/saved content like this can only be done via the website, not at the time of saving it with the extension. Bookmarks can also be imported from Delicious, Firefox, Chrome or any other service that lets you export your bookmarks in Netscape bookmark format.

By default, the website shows your saved pages in “fancy” view (thumbnails) and displayed in chronological order, but you can switch to a list view if you prefer. Bookmarks/saved content is searchable via the search box, although, strangely, it doesn’t seem to include page titles in the search. Mobile support is provided via a mobile-optimized version of the website, which works well, and there are also RSS feeds available: a private feed that contains all of your bookmarks, and a public one only containing those you’ve marked as public.

Copyto.co is free for storing up to 50 bookmarks, which should be enough to give the site a try to see whether you might find it useful. More than that and you’ll need to purchase a subscription, which costs $15.99 per year, or $1.99 month. While Copyto.co is similar to traditional social bookmarking services like Delicious (recently sold to Avos Systems) and Pinboard, its clipping functionality also means it’s competing with note-taking apps like Evernote and OneNote. Combining bookmarking and clipping services means it’s something of a compromise. As a simple bookmarking service, it works pretty well, although it doesn’t have the more-advanced social features of Delicious, and it’s more expensive than both Delicious (free) and Pinboard (one-off payment of $9.33 currently), plus, I find its extensions to be a little clumsy. As a general-purpose clipping tool, it’s nowhere near as powerful and flexible as Evernote, and once again, its extensions aren’t as well-designed. However, it’s still a new service, so I expect the developers will work on making the extensions easier to use, and I can certainly see Copyto.co being useful for certain use cases: researchers who need to clip and share specific portions of webpages with others, and developers who often to grab code from the web, for example.

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There’s no need to create a new account to use it; you can sign in with an existing Google, Facebook, Yahoo or Steam account (or any other account that provides an OpenID). Once signed in, you’re ready to start adding bookmarks to your account, which you can do via a bookmarklet, a Chrome extension, or via the web interface. You can also import bookmarks from Delicious using the import tool.

Your bookmarks are displayed on your account homepage in chronological order. Each bookmark has a thumbnail (if the service can retrieve one), the domain of the site the page is from, and any tags that you’ve applied. There’s also buttons on each bookmark that enable you to edit, delete, flag or make it private. On the right-hand side of the page is a list of your tags. You can click on any of those to apply a filter to make it easier to find the pages that you’re looking for. There’s also a search feature that can search bookmark titles.

The site also supports simple sharing features; you can pick a username and choose to share your bookmarks at a publicly available URL. However, it doesn’t have the fancier social features, like “following” other users and social media integration, supported by other bookmarking services.

Developer Nick Barrett says the site is just an experiment inspired by the Delicious announcement, but it’s a nicely designed experiment that works pretty well, although at times the site does become unresponsive; it may not be able to handle large amounts of traffic, which seems to be a common problem among many of the smaller bookmarking services. It doesn’t have very much in the way of bells and whistles, but if you’re looking for a simple access-anywhere bookmarking service with tagging, search and limited social features as an alternative to Delicious, it’s worth checking out.

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Once you’ve created an account and logged in, you simply authorize the services you want the app to connect to. Trunk.ly will then start collecting any links you share, and it’ll also go back and gather any links you’ve shared in the past from your accounts, too.

Links are displayed in chronological order on the homepage with icons to indicate where they’ve come from, along with any tags and the tweet or message included with the original link. The listing of links is interesting to scroll through but probably not all that useful; where Trunk.ly shines is in its fast search feature, which filters the listing of links as you type, providing a quick way to find links you posted previously. For example, if you vaguely remember sharing a link to an awesome martini recipe a few weeks back and want to find it again, you can use Trunk.ly to dig it out of your archives.

While there’s a bookmarklet for adding links manually to your Trunk.ly account, as well as some social features (you can follow other Trunk.ly users and see their links, and you can also see when other users share the same links as you), it probably isn’t going to replace the existing dedicated social bookmarking services like Pinboard and Delicious, unless you happen to post every single link you’d like to recall to a social media account. However, it is an easy way to maintain a no-effort, zero-cost archive of all those links that you share online.

Let us know what you think of Trunk.ly below.

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Update: On Friday, the company published a post on the Delicious blog saying that the service is not shutting down, but that there is no longer “a strategic fit at Yahoo” for it, and that the company is “in the process of exploring a variety of options and talking to companies right now” about finding a home for the service elsewhere.

• Licorize. Like Delicious, pages can be bookmarked using a bookmarklet, a Chrome or Firefox extension, or via the website. Licorize offers more features than Delicious, though. With each item you add (Licorize calls them “strips”), you set what type of bookmark it is (idea, to-do, goal, reminder, regular bookmark, etc.), and optionally add tags, assign it to a team member and associate it with a project. Depending on what type of bookmark you set the strip as, you also get some additional fields to fill out. For example, to-do strips have a “done” checkbox, while milestone strips have a due date. The basic free version doesn’t include project functionality or the ability to add team members; a premium version with full functionality costs $5 per month, or $49 per year.
• Pinboard.in. Pinboard is a “back to basics” bookmarking service. It’s similar to Delicious, but has a stripped-back user interface and is designed to be extremely fast to use; it’s good for users who had grown frustrated with Delicious’ sluggishness (there’s a comparison of the two services here). Note that Pinboard isn’t free. There’s a one-off charge to register (the charge increases by a small amount with each new signup; it’s currently $7.96). Users can also pay for archival accounts that allow local archiving of bookmarks for a cost $25 per year. Note: Bookmark import is running slowly at the moment, presumably because many users are currently migrating accounts from Delicious.
• Diigo. Diigo goes beyond simple social bookmarking by providing a wealth of features, including collaboration and web page commenting tools; Mike Gunderloy thought it to be the most comprehensive online bookmarking service available. It’s particularly useful for group research projects. It includes a Delicious import tool and client apps are available for iPad and Android.  The service is free and is advertising-supported; education accounts are available.
• Evernote. Evernote is a primarily a multi-platform note-taking tool, but it also works well as a repository for bookmarks. While it lacks Delicious’ social features, it’s a favorite of many of the WWD team. As well as the web app, there are native client apps available for Mac, Windows, iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Palm Pre and Windows Mobile. A basic Evernote account is free; Premium accounts are available for $5 per month or $45 per year, and offer greater upload capacity and improved collaborations and sharing features. Evernote provides support for Delicious users switching to the service here.
• Google Bookmarks. If you just want somewhere to store your bookmarks in the cloud, Google Bookmarks might just do the trick. There’s a bookmarklet for adding new items, and it offers ways to organize your bookmarks via lists and labels, and you can also share and collaborate on your lists with others. Google Bookmarks is free, but you’ll need a Google account to use it.

What Delicious alternative do you recommend?

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If you’ve used other bookmarking services such as Delicious, then Licorize will feel familiar. Pages can be bookmarked using a bookmarklet, a Chrome or Firefox extension or via the website. With each item you add (Licorize calls them “strips”), you set what type of bookmark it is (idea, to-do, goal, reminder, regular bookmark, etc.), and optionally add tags, assign it to a team member and associate it with a project. Depending on what type of bookmark you set the strip as, you also get some additional fields to fill out. For example, to-do strips have a “done” checkbox, while milestone strips have a due date.

The nicely designed website provides a dashboard with a views of your saved strips. By default, the app presents a chronological view of the strips in the order you added them, but you can also filter the view so you can, for example, just see your to-do items, or the items associated with a particular project.

For power bookmarkers, Licorize is well worth checking out. It’s currently in beta and is free. When the product leaves beta, a premium version with full functionality is planned that will cost $5 per month or $49 per year; a free version will still be available but it won’t include the project functionality or the ability to add team members.

Let us know what you think of Licorize in the comments.

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Sharein

In any event, all of this competition is ultimately good for all of us folks that just want to get things done faster and more efficiently. This new focus on saving links — not just sharing them — is a major shift for Sharein, meaning that you can now store these resources as you conduct research online for clients or projects. Let’s take a look at the new features.

New Dashboard

As soon as you login to Sharein you’ll see the new features on the dashboard. There is now a “My Bookmarks” tab. Previously, you had to click on “My Shares” then drill down to “Bookmarks”. Now, you can go straight there. There’s also “Import Bookmarks,” which allows you to pull in your collection of links from Delicious or your local browser.

The Dashboard also provides access to your public profile which displays all of the links that you’ve shared. It also displays graphs and charts of all your shares, thus revealing how popular your shared links have been.

Shorten, Save & Share

Sharein is a good tool for doing research online because you can save any web page that you’re viewing with two quick clicks. First, you have to install the bookmarklet to your browser’s toolbar. Alternatively, there’s a plugin for Firefox that adds a button to the top row of your screen. Once you click the bookmarklet or plugin button, you will see Sharein’s popup window.

Note all of the options available to you. The first tab is for posting the link to Twitter (it’s automatically shortened in order to save valuable character space).

The next option is for Facebook which allows you to share the link on your Facebook account.

The third option is handily allows you to share links via email. It does an excellent job remembering all of the people that you’ve sent links to before. Again, this can come in handy while doing research for a project with a team of team or a client. You can enter the email addresses manually or you can import all of your contacts from other services such as Gmail, Yahoo Mail, etc.

Finally, the fourth option is the much improved “Bookmarks” tab. Here’s where you can save links to your new collection of bookmarks online in the cloud. This means you’ll be able to access all of your links from any computer, much like you can with Delicious and other online bookmarking services. It has also added a new feature for suggesting tags based on the content of the link you’re saving.

Also improved within the bookmarking area is the ability to do more with each bookmark. You can now edit the tags on each bookmark manually or by using the suggested tags feature, and you edit, share and delete your bookmarks.

The New Sharein vs. the New Delicious

I have to be honest here and say that both services have pros and cons. For example, I think Sharein does a much better job than Delicious when it comes to sharing links, thanks to its address book importing and connections to other networks such as Twitter and Facebook. Delicious, on the other hand, is still the king of social bookmarking. Delicious is striving to add more social sharing features in an effort to be more like Sharein, which in turn is now aiming to be more Delicious-like with its new bookmarking features. In the end, we all benefit from services that allow us to do more with less clicks.

Do you prefer Delicious or Sharein for bookmarking and link sharing?

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Using LaterLoop couldn’t be easier.  Begin by signing up on their web site.  Because the service is built on Google’s App Engine (Google’s brand new application environment for web developers), if you have a Gmail (Google) account, you can just sign in.  Otherwise, choose a username and password as normal when signing up for a web service.

Next, install their Firefox Bookmarklet which is displayed on the right.  Now, while perusing the web, if you see a site you like and you want to save it for later, click the LaterLoop bookmarklet and the page will be saved for future reference in your LaterLoop account.

So far, LaterLoop doesn’t look all that different than the other bookmarking tools.  However, to set itself apart, LaterLoop:

• Is optimized for mobile phone users.  So far similar services have released iPhone versions.  LaterLoop takes it a step further by optimizing their service for BlackBerries, Nokias, and Windows Mobile devices as well.
• has a great social feature.  If you want to share a bookmarks, star it and it will then appear in an RSS feed you can publish out to your blog or simply share the RSS feed with your friends.
• features an Airplane mode: this will allow you download a ZIP file of all your links for offline access.
• allows you to grant granular permissions.  You can set all of your bookmarked pages to be public, or just your starred ones.
• supports the Firefox Scrapbook extension.  This is an established Firefox extension that allows you to save sites on your computer for future reference.

After using LaterLoop to bookmark a few sites, it appears to be very functional.  The offline capabilities make it an attractive offering as I travel to sites where Wi-Fi access can be hard to come by.  Also, the mobile site looks fantastic on my Nokia phone.

LaterLoop has put together an attractive offering that is worth taking a look at.

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