Anti-​​Social Bookmarking

It’s been a little while since I wrote on this topic, but social (and not-​​so-​​social) book­marking is on the rise again.

Remember Diigo, Blinklist and Magnolia from all of two years ago? No? And at least 122 others who wanted to become the social book­marking standard. They all lost to deli­cious and improved services from main­stream providers.

All of the com­pet­itors were essen­tially the same as deli­cious but with some extra usab­ility features or nicer interfaces.

You can’t really catch up or overtake com­pet­itors on the web like that, it seems.

Delicious had the early-mover’s advantage of lots of content and a large user base. Even though some of the others were better, func­tion­ally and aes­thet­ic­ally, they couldn’t make up the lost ground.

But here we go again. Because people now have increased expect­a­tions of their com­puters and the Internet; because they are now expecting full-​​fat Internet content on their phones; because the use-​​case is slightly altered, we have a new crop of book­marking apps.

These applic­a­tions are for people are looking for some­thing dif­ferent – multi-​​platform com­pat­ib­ility, privacy, down­loaded content – as well as great usab­ility. The emphasis on sharing is exchanged for an emphasis on utility.

Here are brief reviews of five rel­at­ively new con­tenders. All of them have Firefox Extensions avail­able, which was my criteria for inclusion.

Instapaper

Instapaper was one of the first of the new gen­er­a­tion of book­marking applic­a­tions, and deserves full kudos for that. It was also one of the first to create phone applic­a­tions to com­ple­ment its service. Sadly, though, it’s somewhat eclipsed by its com­pet­itors below when it comes to func­tion­ality and usab­ility. Still main­tains the first-​​mover advantage, though.

+ one of the first of the new breed of book­marking applications

+ really simple and easy

+ iphone app

- rel­at­ively narrow functionality

- no browser integration

ReadItLater

Simple to use, syn­chron­ises, down­loads for offline use. ReadItLater is best-​​of-​​breed if what you want is a means of reading that interesting-​​but-​​lengthy article later. It’s simple and elegant. It might be too simple for some, but in that case, you’ve probably got a more soph­ist­ic­ated solution for book­marking that you can run along-​​side. I have to say that the user exper­i­ence from start to finish is excellent.

+ Scads of apps for almost any platform you can mention.

+ Downloads the full text of articles for offline use.

+ Synchronisation between dif­ferent clients.

- No sharing, tags or so-​​forth – personal use only.

Zotero

The only open-​​source solution on this list, I believe, Zotero is simply awesome for academic researchers. It grabs and stores pages for offline use, creates cita­tions for all of the major academic style guides and indexes them. You can also add tags and notes and rela­tion­ships. This is probably the most powerful nu-​​style book­marker on my list, though not the most elegant. It also lacks the mobile and social features of the oppos­i­tion here.

+ spe­cific­ally designed for academics

+ syn­chron­isa­tion with web server

+ down­loads and parses PDF files as well as web pages.

- no mobile functionality

- spe­cific­ally designed for academics

- no public sharing (hey — it’s for academics… )

EverNote

An applic­a­tion with fervent fol­lowers, EverNote was arguably the first of these applic­a­tions, debuting as a desktop applic­a­tion, if my memory serves me right.

There’s still a great desktop applic­a­tion, and now there are web and mobile versions as well. However, I fail to under­stand the fervour that some people demon­strate for EverNote. I think that there are much better options on this page.

+ applic­a­tions for almost every desktop/​mobile/​thingy you can mention

+ great usab­ility on the desktop.

- not free for some of the most useful features

- also antisocial

- I find the web applic­a­tion cumbersome.

Feedly

I include Feedly here because it’s got most of what it takes and may well integ­rate per­fectly well with your existing web work­stream. Very basic­ally, it’s a skin for Google Reader that makes your RSS feeds look less like a chore and more like an inter­esting magazine about stuff you’re inter­ested in. Its integ­ra­tion of Google Readers Shared Items and Notes means that it could well serve your needs.

+ full integ­ra­tion with Google Reader, without the pain of facing 4000+ unread items

- no mobile app

- Firefox only

What Should You Install?

I’m cur­rently trying to use Feedly and Zotero, but they (very slightly) conflict with each other at the moment*, which is enorm­ously annoying. I’m also using ReadItLater, which remains nice to use and well-​​designed, with great mobile functionality.

If you’re a Power-​​User, I’d go with this setup, and hope the developer of one or the other sort out the conflict soon.

If you just want powerful book­marking and offline reading – Zotero.

If you just want a reminder to read stuff on your own computer – ReadItLater

If you want social, Feedly or stick to delicious.

*The address bar add-​​ins for the two won’t both appear. Normally, Feedly wins.

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