How Social Bookmarking Came To Be

The rise of the Internet has made social interaction more vivid, in both real and virtual worlds. Before, socializing simply meant going through the standard social circles likes clubs, or thru methods like joining dating networks, or meeting people with the same interests in clubs or other social organizations.

Today, the act of connecting with people who share both your interests and passions could now be done easily thru the World Wide Web. One proven and popular method for people to find useful links, groups and interest networks is thru social bookmarking. The method of social bookmarking is a way for internet users to store, classify, share and search Internet bookmarks.

Once a web user is on a social bookmarking network, the user can store lists of Internet resources which they find useful and personally relevant. The lists he complies can then be within reach by users or patrons of a specific network or website. Other web users with related interests and views can then see the links by category, topic, tags, or even randomly. Social bookmarks also offer specific services unique to a precise subject or format, like books, videos, fashion items, map locations, shoes, etc. can be easily found and located.

The idea of shared online bookmarks came to life as early as April 1996, where the launch of itList.com began. The growth of online bookmark services within three years became more competitive, with bigger, venture-backed companies like Backflip, Blink and others inflowing the market. However, due to the lack of viable models for making profits, a lot of this early social bookmarking firms failed when the dot-com bubble burst.

The ever-increasing popularity of social bookmarking rose in 2005 and 2006, when sites, such as del.icio.us, Simpy, and Furl became popular. Netvouz, Diigo and StumbleUpon then entered the bookmarking field's second wave. Newer Sites like reddit, Digg, Newsvine, BEENclicked, Conbuzz, and the new Netscape portal applied social bookmarking into news items. In 2007, IBM entered the social software fray, and the BBC web site also fashioned social bookmarking links for its news and sport articles.

The escalating popularity and competition of different sites has extended the services offered to offer more than just sharing bookmarks, such as rating, the ability to import and export, add notes, reviews, email links, automatic notification, make comments, get feed subscription, web annotation, create groups and social networks.

The main downside to social bookmarking is that it can also be susceptible to corruption and conspiracy. Moreover, due to its popularity, some users have started using it as a vehicle to use along with search engine optimization to enhance their website's visibility. The more a web page is presented and tagged, the bigger would its chances of being found, and spammers have started bookmarking multiple times the same web page and/or each page of their web site using a lot of popular tags, which has forced developers to constantly improve their security systems to effectively filter spam mail and other abuses.

The major distinctive feature of social bookmark applications, however, is the social nature of their use, and currently there is a bias toward increased transparency in these tools, to prevent abuse. Although bookmark collections are personally created and maintained, they are typically visible to others. A number of user interface elements are configured to allow open browsing of the bookmark space. For example, user names are "clickable" links; clicking on a name reveals the bookmarked collection of that user, and allows a web user to get a full idea of the topics of interest for a particular user, which are also visible to others.

Social Bookmarking - http://conbuzz.com