GigaOM » Collaboration

Stripped-down Bookmarking With Yummymarks

Simon Mackie — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 22:00:18 +0000

Ever since Yahoo announced that it was planning to sell off Delicious, I’ve been looking at other bookmarking services. While I’ll probably end up settling on Pinboard, I came across another useful (and, unlike Pinboard, free) bookmarking tool today: yummymarks. It’s a fairly stripped-down service that simply enables you to save and access your bookmarks from any browser.

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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WWD Screencast: How to Export Delicious Bookmarks

Simon Mackie — Fri, 17 Dec 2010 17:00:15 +0000

Updated. The news that Yahoo is may be planning on shutting its popular social bookmarking service Delicious is concerning, particularly if you’ve used it to store a large number of bookmarks. Fortunately, Delicious makes it really easy to make a backup of your bookmarks as an HTML file that you can then import into your browser or into another bookmarking service. Here’s a short video showing how to export your bookmarks:

Watch this video for free on GigaOM

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5 Delicious Alternatives

Simon Mackie — Fri, 17 Dec 2010 15:00:08 +0000

Updated: According to a leaked presentation, Yahoo is planning on shutting down Delicious. That’s bad news for users of the popular social bookmarking tool, but fortunately, there are several excellent alternatives worth investigating. While none of them is an exact like-for-like replacement for Delicious (and none of them can match the network effect of Delicious’ large userbase sharing links with one another), they all offer a selection of useful bookmarking features:

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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