(Reading time: 5 – 8 minutes)

Bookmarking was one of the first features offered in early web browsers, before search engines. Users had to have a way to find web pages they had read, or wanted to read in the future. Saving the URL as a link maintained in a list by the web browser seemed elegant.

Until you changed web browsers… or browsed the web on a different account.

Oh yeah… I should add that all this technology ran on unix networks… not PCs. The machine you sat in front of was irrelevant, only your account mattered. As long as you were using the same account, your browser bookmarks were available.

All changed when PC and Apple joined up. Now, when you changed machines, you changed accounts as well. All your bookmarks were caged on each machine. That’s nasty. It’s like being hobbled – when you’re coming from unix.

All of sudden, maintaining bookmarks turned into a huge problem. The solution: move all the bookmarks to the web; make your bookmarks available anywhere you have a web browser.

There are now hundreds of bookmarking web applications, most of which aren’t very useful. If you focus on just Digg, StumbleUpon and Delicious when you’re just starting out, you will learn the basic technology and build a useful presence.

Let’s take a very brief look at each. To save you some time, I’ll give you a quote and link from the Wikipedia entry, then translate the technical for you, then add how these services benefit you.

1. Delicious

The Delicious.com bookmarking service is one of the earliest web-based bookmarking applications, and of these three, the most “bookmarky.” That is, Delicious focuses on provided “classical” bookmarking rather than news aggregation (Digg) or content discovery (StumbleUpon).

Let’s put up the periscope… here’s what Wikipedia says about Delicious:

Delicious is one of the most popular social bookmarking services. Many features have contributed to this, including the website’s simple interface, human-readable URL scheme, a novel domain name, a simple REST-like API, and RSS feeds for web syndication.

“Too much jargon. What the heck do all those buzzwords and acronyms mean?”

Good question.

Mostly, the jargon means Delicious is easy for you to use, and that it’s easy for developers to build stuff with it. Since it’s easy a lot of people use it and you get good links and traffic back to your website.

(There’s a lesson here for you engineering types attempting to build market share: the author lists features, not benefits. Whoop-te-do.)

I’m on Delicious too.

2. Digg

First, go get your Digg.com account. Then friend dmdoolin.

From 50,000 feet, here’s what Wikipedia has to say about Digg:

Digg is a social news website made for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the Internet, by submitting links and stories, and voting and commenting on submitted links and stories.

The premise of Digg is two fold: first, you create a personal database of articles that interest you; second, articles you submit to Digg get voted on. With enough votes, you may get to the front page of Digg which will drive a LOT of traffic to your website. Once you have you have some experience with Digg, you’ll see that bookmarking is just one capability of many.

Having links on Digg adds to your website’s credibility and authority. However, there is anecdotal evidence that Digg traffic doesn’t convert into sales very well.

Check out Digg in more detail here: To Digg Or Not To Digg — That is the question.

3. StumbleUpon

Combine bookmarking with content discovery and you have StumbleUpon.com.

The long story short on StumbeUpon from Wikipedia:

Web pages are presented when the user clicks the “Stumble!” button on the browser’s toolbar. StumbleUpon chooses which Web page to display based on the user’s ratings of previous pages, ratings by his/her friends, and by the ratings of users with similar interests.

Just as Digg is more than bookmarking, StumbleUpon provides community networking (e.g., friending and simple blogging) and news aggregation services, all very useful for helping you advertise and promote your website.

I also use StumbleUpon as a resource for finding very high quality content. All the content on StumbleUpon has been manually curated, that is, human eyeballs have looked at the web page and found it worthy.

Friend me, StumbleUpon username dmdoolin.

Hat tip : Thanks to Josh Kohlbach for pointing out how to link directly to StumbleUpon. Check out Josh’s article on Creating Linkable Useful Content.

Learning more…

Don’t hold your breath on seeing yet another lame tutorial here at Website In A Weekend. Detailed instructions for basic usage on all of these are available on hundreds of websites, just ask Google, you’ll see.

On the other hand, if you absolutely cannot find the information you need to understand and use any of these three services, leave a comment. If there’s enough demand, or your question is interesting enough, I’ll write something up.

After mastering these three social media services, branch out. You may find surprising traffic from relatively unknown services, you won’t know until you try.

But… you left out my favorite!

Maybe so.

But it doesn’t matter what we personally like best… if 90% of our customers are using something different.

My strategy is to go where the market is, carving out the overlap between the market and what I find fun. (Even WordPress is a bit of compromise. Given my druthers, I’d probably be working on TextPattern… but that market is just too small.) You do the same with bookmarking and maybe I’ll see you on Plurk or something.

Finally, I’m definitely interested in your opinion and comments on these three social media web applications. The key word is social. If all my readers inform me that these three sites suck, and recommend better sites, I. Am. On. It.

Social media, right? You’re part of this too. Speak your mind!