Has anyone used the “alternatives” to del.icio.us which are cropping up all over the web now? Can you import del.icio.us bookmarks easily? Do they generate RSS feeds-a-plenty, like the original? Do they add anything you can’t live without? I’m thinking of:
• de.lirio.us
• Ma.gnolia
• Blinklist
• Shadows
I welcome all thoughts and pointers to other services as well (though not for tools like CiteULike; that’s different.)
Google turned up some annotated lists for the query social bookmarking service, but I’m (a) lazy and don’t want to read, and (b) interested in y’alls experiences.
Kristen Taylor has a detailed look at ma.gnolia, as well as discussion of other social bookmarking sites/apps over at kthread.
There is furl. I signed up for an account, but haven’t used it. It says it makes an archive of the pages you bookmark, so perhaps that wayback dimension adds value.
I use de.lirio.us myself just because I’m an open source nerd. Also, you might have seen it, and I don’t know how helpful it is to you, but I wrote a little something a while back about social bookmarking.
I’ve just posted again today on social bookmarking apps, this time on social annotation tools.
The short answer is that I now use Blummy to organize my social app bookmarklets (I’m trying Ma.gnolia, StumbleUpon, Blinklist, and Diigo besides del.icio.us, Technorati, and Digg), but I think Ma.gnolia is the only one worth your time because it has a thoughtful interface (designed by the Happy Cog crew) and privileges groups, which is what a social app should do. It’s in closed beta, but they are allowing screenshots to be published and almost everything works well. Also, there is a Greasemonkey Firefox script for an “Add to Ma.gnolia” for any del.icio.us site.
Dan, thanks for the pointer. Clancy and Kristen, that was exactly the kind of stuff I was looking for. Good stuff.
I made a de.lirio.us account a while ago; I actually tried to fool around with it a bit the past few days, but the site is having some problems. So, del.icio.us and de.lirio.us are functionally identical? The latter is a bit more cluttered visually, to say the least, and the URLs aren’t as pretty (which matters to nerds like me who type a lot).
I forgot about Digg; I used it for a while, but the annotations were uneven, and the repeats were also irritating. It also seemed overwhelming at times. I should try it again for a while and see if they’ve cleaned some of that stuff up.
Heh, I used to subscribe to digg’s RSS feed, and my aggregator was like 90% digg, 10% everything else.