I am beginning to get an eerie feeling when I visit social bookmarking sites. The feeling is part nostalgia, part de ja vu, and part dread. It’s actually more than just a feeling. When SMO Bookmarking in Delicious, Magnolia or Mister Wong, I hear a voice that whispers: remember me… It’s sort of the same sense you get when you hear a new tune on the radio and recognize the guitar chord progression–”Hey that’s “Sweet Home Alabama” by Lynard Skynard, but the band doesn’t even realize that they have subconsciously plagiarized those chords. They think they wrote the melody themselves!
Once upon a time, there only a few web directories. Moment of silence for Yahoo, DMOZ, Zeal (I miss Zeal), et. al. Then, over the years, we all know what happened. Directory scripts proliferated. Submission software blossomed. These and the other original directories that remain have all been spammed into commercialization (paid directories), dormancy or death. I shut down submissions to my own directories quite a while back. Then Google deprecated web directories in search results.
Social bookmarking sites have cool features that traditional web directories never really incorporated. There are many differences. These are two very high level differences I see:
- Community - I like seeing what my friends are bookmarking. I like adding friends to my profile.
- Organization - I am all but done with browser bookmarking. It’s unwieldy. Delicious will probably be around longer than my current PC hard-drive that I didn’t back up. I like tagging. I like checking out the highest rated sites.
Now, here we are in the Web 2.0 era with AJAXy social bookmarking sites showing off their frontends: clean rounded corners, gradient reflective logos, speech bubbles, rss icons like freshly waxed aerodynamic sports cars. And, unlike in the directory days, they are offering you more than a link. They offer a network of friends. They offer friends’ links to scour, bookmark and improve your Internet life. They give users a reason to come back (other than to submit another link, haha). But, look underneath the surface. Do you see what I see?
- Submit/Add Link = Save/Post
- Categories = Tags
- Comments = Notes
- Recent = Newest Links
- Auto Submit = Import XML File
Do you get the same eerie feeling?