As a consequence I just considered solutions that don’t make me decide which page I want to store and which not. Everything has to be stored automatically for me.

Guard your web entry points

Alternative 1: Guard all your web entry points

I guess everyone has about 5 web entry points where he starts 95% of his web browsing. My web entry points are:

• Bloglines
• Google
• programming.reddit.com
• links shared by colleagues over Skype
• links I get via mail

If all those web entry points are searchable I can track down 95% of any web site I ever visited – granted that I remember how I got to the web site I’m trying to recall (which seems no problem to me).

Of all my web entry points only bloglines has no such thing (I know that google reader has it, if only it could store password protected feeds). Google has google search history, reddit has a – although slow – search (Google’s always an alternative) and it allows me to list all my up/downmodded links (which is quite probably also something I remember). Skype has got a good search (if I remember in which channel the link was posted, which is often not the case) and finally there are enough online mail providers (such as Gmail) and server side mail programs (such as Zimbra) available that offer good search facilities.

Pros/Cons:
Searching for things where you found it on seems very natural to me
you miss the 5%: The link your colleague told you, the news site you check too irregularly to remember, the url you typed in from an advertisement
the refind process is often quite cumbersome

Google browser sync

Use Google browser sync to synchronize
firerox browser history between
your different computers

If your problem is that you use different computers – one at home, one at work – and therefore lose your history every time you switch computers Google browser sync might be a solution. This firefox plugin syncs your browser history, (that means when you start typing into the url field it behaves the same on all synced computers) your bookmarks and optionally your passwords. In the end it really feels like all firefox installations have the same state.
You might scream “privacy!” at this point which is solved quite well for my taste: You can encrypt your browser data right from when it leaves your browser and it is stored encrypted on Google’s servers. They promise they don’t decrypt your data using your password which seems quite fair to me.

Pros/Cons:
it solves recalling links within the last few days (which might be just what you want)
you can’t go back more than the number of days back you set your firefox history settings (which you might set to 999 days). This might not be a big disadvantage as the value of a bookmark vanishes over time: As soon as you forgot that you have bookmarked a certain page this bookmark is of no value to you anyway (I quickly skimmed through 100 of my delicious bookmarks from 2 years ago: I remember only 8% of the pages I bookmarked)
your search in firefox history is restricted to just the page titles – which might be not enough (and too many web sites still have meaningless titles)

Google history

When you mark ‘PageRank and Site Info’
then your browsing history is transmitted
to Google and allows you to use ‘Google history’

When you have google firefox toolbar installed and you have pagerank activated in your options your browser sends every loaded url to a Google server. Then on Google history you have a fulltext search over all the websites you ever visited.

Pros/Cons:
having a fulltext search over all visited pages is pretty neat.
it is a privacy nightmare. Google will use this data to improve their services.
your searches are restricted to the public web. Sites from your intranet or any service you need to login (such as your feed aggregator) are not searchable.
the web site you visited might have changed (such as the reddit frontpage or your local newspaper site) and the web site as you saw it is no longer in Googles indexes
the search is quite slow (compared to google web search)

Google desktop search

“I remember I saw it on programming.reddit.com…”
Google Desktop Search shows a history of all
my visits to programming.reddit.com

Another one from Google: Google Desktop is known for it’s capability to search files on your computer. Apart from this, Google Desktop also stores all the web pages you visit with your browser. That is the content of the page you really looked at, not the page that is in the Google cache. And this is quite an improvement to “Google history”:

1. You can search in an index that contains things you actually saw on that website. No matter how short something was on that website, this is now in your index. You remember you saw something on programming.reddit.com but you didn’t click on it? Search in your local google desktop cache and you have access to the html of all your visits to programming.reddit.com.
2. Your search doesn’t end at the “login screen”: Google desktop holds cache of your corporate wiki and your internal bug tracking system.
3. Once you have it, you’ll never lose it: Documents get deleted from the web or they get moved behind a pay-only wall. You won’t lose this valuable information as it is stored safely in your Google Desktop index.

Google desktop lets you access the data in index in many ways:

• In case you remember some exact words of the web page you’re looking for you can simpy search and order by relevance/date
• In case you remember the date you can browse through the history of that day
• In case you remember how you got to that web page you can search for the referring site and visit the browsing history to find the page this way

And it solves the problem with multiple browsers with the ability to sync you indexes via a Google Server (Windows only, Linux is still lacking that feature, you can ‘vote’ for that feature.)

Pros/Cons:
Gogole Desktop is “Google history” without the disadvantages
The software is proprietary, you don’t really know what’s going on, you need to trust Google (there are alternatives: Beagle (Linux only) and Slogger (just saves your browser history, lacks a search frontend)
Your history data is locked in. The cache lives in a binary file on your harddisk

That said I still find Google Desktop very neat. Although I just have tested it for two weeks it greatly served me for accessing web documents more quickly and without the saving effort needed on online bookmarking services.

Clarification

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:

Right tool: Use bookmarks to get things done

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.

Right tool: Sharing links

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.

Wrong tool: Remembering potentially interesting links

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.

Reason 1: You can’t foresee the future

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.

Your categories may change when you get
familiar with a product or topic

Your information level when looking at a document
differs from when trying to recall that document

Reason 2: You tear links out of its context

Bookmarking is like cutting passages
from books: you remove information
from the context you originally found it

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?

Reason 3: It takes too much time

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?

Reason 4: It didn’t work for me

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.

Reason 5: Social bookmarking won’t improve that soon

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.