Written on May 8, 2008 – 11:00 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
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One thing I enjoy most about services like Twitter and Friendfeed are the interesting links people post. Whenever I’m in a desperate need of some inspiration, I head over to social bookmarking sites such as Stumbleupon, delicious and some Dutch version. Yet there are more services like this, all offering different ways to present or save interesting finds on the web. Though they’re not that well-known. Let’s change that. Here are sixupcoming tools to share and find interesting links. Start sharing!
Photo by F33
1. Iterasi, save your webpages (private beta)
So you’re now checking out a list of social bookmarking services, yet I can already tell you that not one looks as fancy as Iterasi. It’s a browser-based service that not just saves a link to the preferred page, but includes ALL the information - even links and images. After logging in to Iterasi, you can just scroll through those pages you wanted to save for later. One of the most important advantages is searching through the text. So searchability doesn’t just depend on your tagging skills anymore. For more info I gladly refer to Eric Eldon from Venturebeat , who has published a review.
www.iterasi.com
2. Fleck, annotate the web (beta)
Full disclosure: I’m sitting next to talented developer Lenniez (he’s a good photographer as well) whose actually responsible for this groundbreaking tool. Inspired by Kevin Kelly’s story We are the Web, three entrepreneurs in white suits have started this service that offers you the possibility to note specific places on any web page with a bookmarklet or fancy flash browser tool. Comes in very handy when you are reviewing a website or if you want to point out a spelling error, to name a few examples. I specifically use it to enrich my links on Twitter (example of the Twitter integration here).
www.fleck.com
3. Socialmedian, social news aggregator (private beta)
New kid on the block by Jobster founder Jason Goldberg that got some blog coverage last month. It’s a social news aggregator which allows you to clip interesting stories. Browse through various News Groups and share relevant links with other news group members. Perfect for folks who want tips from like-minded people. Read the review by Mashable’s charming Kristen Nicole to learn more about this service. Oh and by the way, according to our UK WebTipr David Petherick, it “might be a next big thing”.
www.socialmedian.com
4. i-Lighter, save parts of the Internet
Remember that yellow marker you used in high school and university? Well, I certainly can recall hours of highlighting important stuff in my textbooks. Now there is a digital equivalent to mark text and images you want to save or share. Just download the Windows or Apple desktop app and relive that yellow marker experience for your social bookmarking convenience. The traditional press - such as The New York Times - love this service, probably because the yellow highlighter is such a familiar tool. They’ve probably ignored the useful Twitter integration, as they didn’t use that in highschool.
www.i-lighter.com
5. Bemba
The two kind guys from Bemba aim for people who don’t why complicated services, they just want to get the job done. After these people have installed the Bemba plugin — there’s no bookmarklet — they can share anything entertaining they find on social networks with just two clicks. I interviewed the CEO Aaron Peters a couple of weeks ago and he told me that “Bemba provides the easiest way to share web content with friends, on any social network or (micro)blog. This way we make the web more fun.” So they’re basically competing with the Share option of Facebook. Read the rest of the interview for more info about this challenge for Bemba.
www.bemba.com
6. Instapaper
Instapaper helps you to get rid of the ‘2read’ tags in del.icio.us by offering a simple bookmarklet and even simpler website. Developer Marco Arment left every fancy function out and focused just on the basics: temporary storage for long articles. Therefore, the site is easy accessible - even with my crappy mobile phone and iPod Touch. After I wrote about Instapaper on April 1, I started using it a lot and browsed to the web page every Saturday for some serious reading.
www.instapaper.com
So that’s it for the new and upcoming sharing and saving tools. Now it’s up to you — which service will you use? Or did I forget your favorite one? Please share it in the comments, so we can create one helluva alternative social bookmarking list.
Written on April 18, 2008 – 8:30 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
If you follow blogs like The Next Web and Altsearchengines, you might notice that social search engines are booming. Stumpedia, Topicle, AndUnite, you name it. They’re popping up everywhere and at least twice a week, one of the founders sends me a line to tell me why his engine is gonna be the top of the bill.
Geoffrey McCaleb from Nsyght is one of them. He and his team have found a new take on social searching: allowing users to use their bookmarks and their social graph to create a customized search experience. “the real eureka moment came when I thought, how can an algorithm tell me whats relevant when my assumptions of relevancy are going to be different from everyone else.”
McCaleb believes that no algorithm can replace the objectivity of a human being. “We all have different concepts and notions of what we find relevant. So, we wanted to create a search engine that didn’t treat every set of keywords the same. What you find relevant for a search may be different from mine.”
The beta version of Nsyght provides integrations into a number of social services such as del.icio.us, ma.gnolia, simpy, digg, last.fm, twitter, and pownce. “We do a couple of things with the social graph, we preserve friendships across different social networks, and we allow for users to syndicate their bookmarks between these services. The key takeaway point here, the more information we know about a person, the more we can customize the search to make it more relevant to them.”
The holy grail
But the most important question remains, Mr. McCaleb. Why would the public choose your search engine, out of all the other alternatives?
“Well there may be a lot of competition in this space, but I feel pretty strongly no one has approached the problem in the same way we have. The holy grail in search is not having the biggest index, but the one that gets you a relevant result in the shortest possible time. While we are small - a given since we are self-funded - we obviously have a ways to go. But as we gain more users, we will gain more of their bookmarks, and then we will have even more highly relevant sites in which to crawl and index.
Another way to look at it is this. PageRank is a brilliant concept, and still does an incredible job determining relevancy. But fundamentally, even with all the data points probably looks at it still is more concerned about the source and not the content. What we can do is let the user define the sites they feel are relevant, leverage their social network, and over time see their results become highly personalized. So in a way, augmenting the algorithm for their own use and gain.”
What do you use?
The only way to end this article, in my opinion, is to ask you guys whether you really use social search engines? Since you’re probably the most web-savvy crowd out there, you would also be the first ones to adopt a new trend. So tell me, still on Google? Or already switching to the brand new social engines?
Written on April 1, 2008 – 11:57 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
What can we take away, to create something new?
This question was asked by Evan Williams during Le Web 3. Loyal readers of the Next Web Blog might recognize this quote, since I’m referring to it quite often. Williams’ presentation have been fascinating me for quite a while now. It often spooks through my head when reviewing a service.
So when I stumbled upon new bookmarking service Instapaper, I was immediately enthusiastic. The thing is, I’ve been using Delicious for a while to save long articles for later. Yet despite some heavy ‘2read’ tagging these links often escaped my attention.
There’s hardly any chance that I will loose any links on Instapaper.com. Developer Marco Arment left every fancy function out and focused just on the basics: temporary storage for long articles. Therefore, the site is easy accessible - even with my crappy mobile phone and iPod Touch. It’s just a matter of saving the articles with a bookmarklet and looking them up through the site or RSS.
So from now on, when I have an hour of spare time, I just browse to Instapaper and read the well-written content that otherwise would have never got my attention. After doing that, I can always share them on Delicious or Fleck.
Written on January 29, 2008 – 11:49 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Some things never change. You would think that with Del.icio.us, Google Bookmarks and all the other social bookmarking initiatives, nobody would be doing it the old fashioned way with, you know, actual bookmarks. But AddThis tracks what people do on a huge collection of websites. They offer a simple yet powerful widget that makes it easier to share URLs with bookmarking services. Because they do this they can provides statistics about the bookmarking and sharing activity of users.
More people now share URLs via Facebook than Del.icio.us. But Bookmarks or Favorites, are back, stealing the first position from Google Bookmarks. And yes, they mean “browser bookmarking”. Actual bookmarks, in browsers.
Interestingly enough Facebook has just taken the third spot away from Del.icio.us.
Top Bookmarking/Sharing - October 2007
I think we can look at this as yet another reality check. While we, the Web 2.0 industry, think that everybody is doing the ‘web thing’ just as sophisticated as us, most people are still using the tools they’re familiar with. And IF they’re are using a tool, it’s.., of course, Facebook.
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