previous post: «The delicious lesson - revisited»One common task while browsing the web is making sure you will be able to recall a valuable information you are just looking at. This article aims to prove that social bookmarking as in delicious, simpy, magnolia et al. is the wrong tool for that task.
According to comments here and on reddit, it was obvious that my intention of this post was somehow misunderstood - partly because of the original misleading title (was: “.. - 5 reasons why social bookmarking doesn’t work”). Maybe these adaptions from an xkcd comic does clarify:
I think, derefr sums this up very nice:
I find a GTD approach works well: what next action are you going to apply to this bookmark? If it’s just “well, it was neat!” you have no reason to save it (perhaps share it, but not save it), and can throw it away.
The same goes for using the tag “mycomment” to follow up discussions you’ve partaken or “toread” to know what to read once you’ve got some free time. These bookmarks all serve a purpose that is clear to you while bookmarking. This also helps you picking an appropriate tag. No critique on that one.
It is clear that bookmark sharing sites such as reddit, Digg, or Stumbleupon that all focus on link sharing have proven that this concept works. Delicious, Simpy, Magnolia et al. all have features to help you share your bookmarks. No critique on that one.
This is what this article is dealing about: Saving bookmarks that are not useful to you now but - without yet knowing what you’ll use this bookmark for - you save it because it is potentially interesting in the future. I think that doesn’t work and the 5 points should prove that.
Deciding which web site will be valuable in the future is a very very hard task. I’m not too good at it. I pile up tons of bookmarks I never look at afterwards and on the other hand I decided to not bookmark sites which I needed afterwards. In fact I’m so unsure about my ability to bookmark the right pages I often don’t try searching for a link in my pile of bookmarks but instead google first because I expect being faster this way. Too often I searched my bookmarks altering tags and search terms and didn’t find the bookmark in the end.
Additionally: Even if I would know which links will be of interest in the future, I can’t decide how I should tag (categorize) my bookmarks. When I tag an article, I normally have skimmed it and while categorizing I look at its title. When I tag I’m in a completely different situation - information wise - from when I search for the link.
The word “bookmark” relates to the pretty carton markers you use when reading books. Although the way it is used in the web is far far from what it means in books lets delve into that comparison a bit:
To go sure you will be able to find an important passage once you finished a book, you underline or write a few words into the margin to outline a paragraph. Then, when you recall that great sentence you most certainly know in which book it was written (unless that book is a conglomeration of quotes). Then, you often can remember the way that statement was used in the argumentation and in what topic it was embedded. And finally, amazingly, your brain often tells you where on a page (e.g. bottom left) the searched sentence is written. So you normally get quite a bunch of context information to guide you in your search and you will find the wanted sentence within a short amount of time, even if it wasn’t underlined. And even if you don’t find it, you often have a good time reading through the other amazing statements and end up quoting something you didn’t intend.
The way bookmarks are handled in the web would mean to books that you tear out that sentence out of the book, stick a few colored post-its to it and throw that snippet onto the pile with the 1325 other quotes. Bookmarking means taking information out of the context you originally found the information in. On the web context means how you found that link: Was it on Google or in your feed aggregator? Was it a blog post of one of your colleagues? Was it in an email? I often remember these things. Without being a psychologist or having an education in these things I guess our brain is pretty good in remembering context. So why don’t we use techniques that help our brain instead of trying to replace it?
Bookmarking should save you time - and frustration. Leaving out the frustration bit: Does it really save you time?
Lets say it takes 10 seconds to categorize a bookmark and lets say you’ll use every 20th of your saved bookmarks (which are rather optimistic guesses). That means that when trying to recall an url from your bookmarking service you need to be 200 seconds faster than when you didn’t bookmark any pages at all (as it took you 200 seconds for bookmarking the 20 bookmarks out of which you used 1).
I’m pretty sure you won’t save over 3 minutes in average searching in your pile of bookmarks compared to thinking for halve a minute where you found that link and then going down that trail. So: Why the hassle?
I tried it. I gathered 3444 bookmarks in 2 years using 3034 tags. I asked myself how I could change my tagging practices to improve the recall. I failed. I gave up. I cannot believe there’s no one out there feeling the same.
I stopped bookmarking nearly two months ago. First, when reading articles that felt so interesting it was hard to not bookmark them. Then, it was kind of liberating not having to think “is this page valuable in the future?” “what tags should I use?”.
I never missed it. I always found that link. I don’t regret.
You may argue that there soon will be techniques to overcome the problems I just mentioned. But my claim is that social bookmarking sites won’t improve that soon.
In my last post I asked: “Why is tagging stuck?”. Gene Smith argues correctly that tagging isn’t stuck. He continues:
Want to know what is stuck? Del.icio.us
The same is true for all the other social bookmarking sites. RawSugar did a brilliant next step (before it went offline) but the social bookmarking market is quiet ever since. I couldn’t find fresh ideas in delicious’ current redesign. It seems like they moved buttons from here to there. I hoped they wouldn’t just redesign the appearance but would also change the way users interact with their data.
So, I guess these services are just as good as it gets. No improvements to wait for. That means it’s our - the users - turn to change our habits, to find the right tool for the job.
RSS feed for comments on this post.
In the end, people are going to remember to use the resource if it’s worthwhile. A bookmark is helpful as sort of a “memory note” but there are sites you bookmark and do return to.
We find that people who bookmarked our error message search engine, bug.gd, did, in fact, come back and visit. Sites like del.icio.us helped us spread the word for our (useful, IMHO) service.
Comment by Matthew — October 23, 2007 6:09 pm #comment-94094
I’ve collected over 2500 bookmarks on del.icio.us, and it has been extremely helpful, not only personally, but for other as well.
You’re forgetting the _social_ part of social bookmarking. I guest lecture in a class at the University where I work, and del.icio.us plays a huge part in the organization of web resources that students can use in the class.
That’s not to say your arguments aren’t valid. I have a petpeeve with del.icio.us especially as it nearly freezes my browser every time I go to my bookmarks page. But wait a few seconds, and we’re off. Hopefully, they’ll fix that soon.
It probably helps if you choose the right tags and give some thought to how you’re going to use the site in the future. I’m able to usually filter from 2500 to the one I need in about 30 seconds. The other day I spent five minutes looking to a certain link, only to discover that I hadn’t actually saved it. 15 minutes later, after combing google, I was able to eventually stumble upon the original site. I’ll take del.icio.us over that any day of the week and twice on sunday.
Comment by Josh Charles — October 23, 2007 6:27 pm #comment-94098
I find using the Google notebook plugin in Firefox to be a better way of capturing some of the context (hilight the text -> right click -> “Note this”). It stores the hilighted text and the link to the page its from. These go into a “Scrap/Inbox” notebook. Later I usually go through what’s built up there and recategorize of delete. Works for me…
Comment by Steve — October 23, 2007 6:29 pm #comment-94099
I started using delicious after I discovered that at least two of the available bookmark synchronizers mangled my browser’s bookmarks, probably because I have a very deep tree structure that overloaded them.
I find that I use a few of my delicious bookmarks repeatedly. I probably should move them into my browser bookmarks.
Comment by mark — October 23, 2007 6:33 pm #comment-94100
I find del.icio.us very useful. I don’t put every page I see on there and make it overwhelmingly large though. I put HowTos and technical info that could be handy for troubleshooting on my del.icio.us. One thing I made sure to put there as soon as I managed to find it the second time was an explanation of why ext3 doesn’t need to be defragmented almost ever. It’s a commonly asked question for Linux newbies.
Comment by Mackenzie — October 23, 2007 6:34 pm #comment-94101
Until now I have been bookmarking and blinking with a semi-conscious fear that the pattern is fundamentally broken. I wonder if Googles search history coupled with Google notebook (highlight text, save snippet with URL) may be heading in the right direction. Only problem right now is whether to bookmark this post or not.
Comment by dg — October 23, 2007 7:15 pm #comment-94108
Josh: Yes, I left out the social aspect of delicious. I did that intentionally as the post would have become too big.
I don’t want to criticize the social aspect, the link sharing, the collaborative link collections. I think these services have some valuable features that help you do that. My point is that delicious shouldn’t be called a “social bookmarking” site but a “social link sharing” site. Its the focus of the service that I question.
Comment by Philipp Keller — October 23, 2007 7:46 pm #comment-94110
I find delicious a helpful site when it comes to bookmarking pages and sharing links. And I have since been contented if this is all that delicious has to offer. There are other social networking sites out there that can accommodate the other uses of a real social networking and bookmarking site.
Comment by Mary — October 23, 2007 7:55 pm #comment-94112
It might be a good idea to archive the textual content with wget, and save a note file so you can know what the original URL for the content was. For stuff that I’m still in the process of reading, I tend to edit a bookmarks.txt file that I put into a darcs repository that I can always access. Another thing to consider is putting all these archived snipets into your public_html, and using a service like alltheweb.com with a site filter; with enough content and some luck, theres a good chance you can use these public search services to scan through all your archived content.
Comment by JN — October 24, 2007 12:42 am #comment-94157
You may have a point when it comes to recalling bookmarks. On the few occasions I’ve tried to use del.icio.us to find a save site I’ve struggled a little, picking at several different tags before hitting on the right one. I have found things have been getting better as I try to limit the tags I use. The recommended tags are good for this.
That said (and as you point out), there are other reasons for using these services. My main reasons for using del.icio.us these days are: 1) creating link-blogs for my sites (e.g., all bookmarks tagged “machinelearning” end up on the sidebar of my machine learning blog), and 2) watching for new articles or software.
Comment by Mark — October 24, 2007 4:35 am #comment-94212
“I gathered 3444 bookmarks in 2 years” … “and lets say you’ll use every 20th of your saved bookmarks (which are rather optimistic guesses)”
What the heck are you saving? That’s almost 5 bookmarks a day, every day — 7 if you only worked weekdays. Do you really run across 5 things every day that you think are worth saving? Are you saving every lolcat picture you find or something?
No wonder you think using 1/20th of your bookmarks (172 — more than I’ve bookmarked total!) is optimistic. Empirically, if you’re not using the things you bookmark later, doesn’t it stand to reason that you’re bookmarking too much crap?
I’ve been using delicious for a few months, and I’ve saved a bit under 1 per day, and I thought that was a lot, but my bookmarking rate has dropped a bit. Based on what I looked up this week so far, alone, I’ve used more than 1/10 of the things I bookmarked. All you have to do is think “will I *really* use this again?”.
Comment by tim — October 24, 2007 9:31 am #comment-94287
Tim: I’d appreciate if you’d show a little more respect.. It’s not that I wrote this post in one afternoon grumbling about delicious. This is something I thought of very carefully over months - this still does not mean it doesn’t have faults.
About your objections: I don’t think I’m on the extreme side. Going through the 15 people that have bookmarked this post on delicious proves that:
The median is 4912 bookmarks, the average even 6746 the maximum even 19561 bookmarks!
I gathered a lot of statistics from delicious and I don’t think I’m too far off the reality.
“All you have to do is think ‘will I *really* use this again?’”:
This is exactly the difficulty. How do you know? You are saving links that are potentially interesting for you in the future. What if you’re looking at a great overview of richtext editors. You don’t need one right now but you might in the future for a project. Or a colleague asks you for an advise and you say: Wait, I remember stumbling over a great article of this. And then you need to look that one up.
It probably also depends on what/how you’re working. I work for a websearch company which means I “work in the web”. I’ve got a private project - an extranet for a group of 100 people. Then I’ve got this blog I regularly write things for. That’s three targets. I read programming.reddit.com, I have read many rss feeds holding interesting links. 5 bookmarks a day is not much!
Comment by Philipp Keller — October 24, 2007 12:36 pm #comment-94341
I’ve been here before, and even saved an article of yours (somewhere lol), but I gotta say, I think you are way off base on this one.
I currently have 11.3k+ self-inflicted saves in my del.icio.us account and would really be a ship-out-of-water if Y! went tits up in 24hrs (which is why I do periodic full db extracts).
All I can guess is that your filing system must have been out of whack, or else you just don’t get to too many different sites - so little that you can remember pertinent stuff on your own - unless of course you have a photographic memory or something.
Of course, there is also the rollover/RSS extract for ad revenue/pipes thing to consider too, but that is a whole other self-gratification?) scenario to think about.
No, I’ll be keeping my del.icio.us db with its 54 bundles and God knows how many different tags. Of course, everybody tries to do what is best for themselves in their situation, so all I can add is, G/L.
btw: If my db disappeared right now, I would have to say that Smashing Magazine would be my first stop for a more than adequate recovery. Without any affiliation, I have to say, ‘That site rocks!”
Comment by BillyG — October 24, 2007 12:50 pm #comment-94347
If it’s worth reading twice, it’s worth downloading.
wget -rNpk –execute robots=off -U “Mozilla/5.001 (windows; U; NT4.0; en-us) Gecko/25250101″
Comment by Sam — October 24, 2007 3:07 pm #comment-94378
I beg to differ but the reasons are too long for a comment field.
Comment by masukomi — October 24, 2007 3:33 pm #comment-94387
I’m surprised you managed to keep it to just 5 reasons ;)
Anyway, I use http://favowitz.com/ for my bookmarks and I find it really helpful and easy to use.
Comment by russ — October 24, 2007 3:34 pm #comment-94391
You know you are absolutely right - so much so that pretty much all I use delicious for these days is link *sharing*. I share links with my friends, but I struggle to categorize them. I just shared this link with my friend in fact, and you gave me the liberation to ignore entirely any idea of what tag it should have - why should I? I’m not coming back to your post any time soon (no offense) - and if I do - often the historical context in delicious is the only one I need - tags do nothing.
The other sharing I do is with an automated “buzz” generator that I set up for my company, which is the same thing as sharing for friends, except I tag for a Yahoo! Pipe which aggregates links and displays them via RSS on our home page.
Great post!
Comment by Taylor — October 24, 2007 5:44 pm #comment-94422
Actually, I just re-tagged your article, with “commented”. I do that for any blog I comment on and want to track - it’s the only way to follow up on any comment thread these days.
That’s the next blog I think needs to be written - how the blogosphere is entirely fractured into the tiniest little communities and there is no way to have reasonable discussions any longer - comments on blogs are just broken - I think I saw a blog about that actually…nothing is ever new : http://javathink.blogspot.com/2006/09/research-it-first.html
Comment by Taylor — October 24, 2007 5:48 pm #comment-94424
The tools may not be good for you, but for most they serve people quite well.
I have to say del.icio.us has become a horrible tool for refinding things I have bookmarked. I have over 2600 bookmarks and gobs of tags, but del.icio.us has not provided the ability to get back to things I know I have saved there.
I moved my corpus to Ma.gnolia and have not had this problem. If I did not tag something with a term I am trying to use for recall it may not find it, but often it also searches in the document (it saves a copy as del.icio.us does not) and can find a match that way and it looks in other’s tags.
ClipMarks has a similar solution.
There is a great need for a solution to your problem to be implemented, the solution for tag healing is well known, it takes server resources, which has limited its implementation so far. Most of the services have built something that can adequately perform this tag healing (searching for social bookmarking and I only put folksonomy and tagging, but normally also put social bookmarking).
The problem is not with social bookmarking being a wrong tool, it is the tools have not grown-up. Most tools have followed del.icio.us, but it is not the leader for functionality any more and has not been for 18 months or more. Del.icio.us has a large mass of people using it, which should not be confused for it being the best tool. Other social bookmarking tool do get this stuff right and are improving greatly.
Comment by vanderwal — October 24, 2007 8:23 pm #comment-94450
mmm… but, i found your article via stumble… i think the value in social bookmarking is the fact that you can be surprised on how a topic is enhaced by other people, at least that’s the funny part for me: i tagged “art” thinking in Van Gogh but now i’m enjoying “urban art” thanks to someone who thought that graffitti is “art” too.
Comment by cosa — October 24, 2007 10:07 pm #comment-94471
“I’d appreciate if you’d show a little more respect.”
I like it when people tell me my ideas are silly; most ideas are. (How else would I know when I hit a good one?) Sorry if you took it wrong.
“You are saving links that are potentially interesting for you in the future.”
No, that’s not what I said. I said “will I use this again”. “Interesting” and “will use” are disjoint sets. I can see how if you were selecting for “interesting” that it would fail at “useful in the future”. You have to separate these concepts in your mind.
“It probably also depends on what/how you’re working. I work for a websearch company …”
Well, all those apply to me, too, but I seem to delicious an order of magnitude fewer bookmarks.
Perhaps my first comment here is relevant. I think of all things (including blog postings and ideas in my own head) as fundamentally useless, unless they can prove otherwise. “Interesting” is not a high enough threshold — I have interesting ideas all day. You’re a collector. :-)
Comment by tim — October 24, 2007 10:57 pm #comment-94484
Tim: Ok, I misinterpreted your writing style. Apologies!
I think I now understood your point and I fully concur.
I’ve written a new section “clarification” at the start that should help clear things up a bit. Is this also what you meant?
Comment by Philipp Keller — October 26, 2007 8:43 am #comment-94788
I know that you are not talking about social part. But, folks bookmarking “interesting” sites is important. Interesting for one person might be Useful for another.
What I like about delicious is what I call the “Being John Malkovich” part. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120601/
Do you remember that movie? Wasn’t such a good movie, but the idea was brilliant.
I think delicious lets to do that; up to a degree of course. If you look at John Udell’s subscriptions, you know what he is going to read; and if you know what he is going to read, you can guess what he is going to write about. A portal to John Udell’s mind. Now try to beat that. I would have killed to take a look at an Umber geek’s bookmarks or installed programs list. delicious is an absolute favorite.
Comment by Prashant Rane — November 2, 2007 6:04 am #comment-96176