Andrew Channels Dexter Pinion

Wherein I write some stuff that you may like to read. Or not, its up to you really.

July 07, 2004

The Year of the Bookmark Service

Is this the year of the bookmark service? I'm currently spoilt for choice when I want to record a URL for later use. I've got the bookmarks feature of each of the browsers I use, spread across two machines. Then there are the web services which seems to be the appearing by the month.

I've currently got accounts with del.icio.us, Furl and unalog. They are all similar, but have different spins on the collection of links.

del.icio.us allows you to categorise posts with keywords and see who else has recorded that link. Furl is stronger in the "social software" space, they recommend links based on what you have recorded, and show you people with similar interests. Unalog is like a collective link blog with shared categories. Of course, with my technical biases I should really be concentrating on Unalog, as it's written in Quixote, which has just released version 1.0 by the way. But usage is king, and I seem to have a lot more links in del.icio.us than anywhere else. I also like the RSS support and API, which enable anyone to get to their data using languages like Python and PHP.

In the interests of fairness I should point out that Furl offers RSS feeds as well.

Now, to celebrate their first birthday the nice people at Bloglines have introduced another, similar service. Although they have combined the collection of links with blogging and are calling it the clip blog. Here is mine. Just don't look at it in Safari as the layout is currently broken, probably due to a CSS quirk.

Which is best? I'm undecided, so I'll probably carry on using them all.

Posted by Andy Todd at July 07, 2004 11:40 AM

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