How big are social bookmarks services?
Can you tell that i can’t get del.icio.us out of my head? I just came across Ryan’s post that technorati dropped del.icio.us in favor of furl for their tag searches. Not because they’re taking sides, but because del.icio.us couldn’t handle the load. I wanted to write how it’s unfortunate that technorati only uses one of the many services out there, until i noticed that now they are actually integrating results from both del.icio.us and furl on tag searches, good thing. Take a look at this tag search for folksonomy as an example.
Update: Clearly technorati is trying to drive me crazy. When i do a tag search on folksonomy right now, i only get results from furl, not del.icio.us. A tag search for apple returns results from both del.icio.us and furl however. Your mileage may vary.
It also got me thinking. Is there any data about the marketshare of various social bookmarking services? The obvious posterchild in the blogosphere is del.icio.us and wists got a lot of coverage when it launched recently, but it looks like furl is also doing well, albeit more under the radar.
How fragmented is the market? It almost looks like a new service is launched daily. What’s their userbase? Last time i read a number Joshua wrote del.icio.us had around 50000-60000 users, but that was some time ago and i don’t know numbers for any of the other services. How active are their users? What’s their userbase, what’s their target-group?
What’s their business-model (subscriptions, donations, ads, selling out their user’s data, …)? Do they offer any sort of api to access their data (del.icio.us and wists do, furl apparently doesn’t)? Are there any plans for integration between different services? Are there architectural, behavioral or cultural differences which make integration futile?
Lots of questions, few answers. The buzz game social bookmarks market places del.icio.us and furl head-to-head at the very top at the time of this writing, followed by feed me links and gibeo, two services i haven’t even heard about before. More reading: Travis’ comparison between del.icio.us and furl, 10 cool things to do with furl. I could sign up for some services to get a feeling for how you use them and how others are using them, but for reasonable results it’s not enough to sign up and tinker around a bit.
Perhaps i’ll scour many2many for something over the weekend, or does anyone have better pointers? Activity-spidering their link-lists might be an interesting starting point as well…
Tag (hmm, I meant that in the good day sense),
Give Simpy[1] a try. It’s got a few features lacking from delicious: powerful full-text search with popular syntax (+, -, phrases, fuzzy queries…), bookmark upload and export, Topics and Topics Filters, Notes, detection of broken, redirected and forgotten links, etc.
[1] http://www.simpy.com/
Comment by Otis on Mar. 31st, 2005, at 20:54 #
I use Furl, and advise others to as well, because the UI is one of the cleanest, search is powerful, “suggestions” of other articles and other peoples’ bookmark feeds work well, and most importantly, because each Furl click saves a cached copy of the page you are Furling into your account. That’s rad. I too hope to do a comparative review type write up soon on my blog.
Also of interest to me are the demographic qualities of the user bases. For example, if I’m working with a group of anti-racism activists, will they find content better for their needs and interests via Furl, Delicious or something else? How even to evaluate this is something I’d like to get suggestions on.
Comment by Marshall on Apr. 3rd, 2005, at 1:29 #
Maybe http://www.irox.de/roxomatic/687 is of interest to you…
Comment by Kossatsch on Apr. 8th, 2005, at 13:51 #