stumble-upon any other delicious magnolias lately?
December 16, 2010 12:31 PM   Subscribe

In light of this picture swirling around the web, it seems timely to revisit the question: what's the best social bookmarking service? Please compare and recommend.

It looks like this question was partly asked/answered in 2007 and again following Magnolia's crash in 2009, while Maciej's Pinboard was discussed previously on the Blue, but have there been more recent developments?
posted by Prince_of_Cups to Computers & Internet (35 answers total) 78 users marked this as a favorite
 
What are your requirements for the service? I'm using delicious and I'm perfectly happy just because it is so simple and minimalist and also integrates so well with Firefox.
posted by griphus at 12:38 PM on December 16, 2010 [1 favorite]


I'm using delicious

Not for long, you aren't. That's the point of the question, right? Delicious is being discontinued.

People are suggesting Pinboard a lot. I have heard great things about it but it's still...a company.
posted by circular at 12:42 PM on December 16, 2010 [4 favorites]


Everyone I know is moving over to Pinboard today. I bought an account ages ago when it was like a dollar and am just now starting to play around with it. Seems wonderful, and has lots more nice integration + workflow features than delicious had. As a long time and relatively hardcore delicious user, I'm pretty happy so far. They're getting hammered today, though, so some of the integration stuff is shut off while they weather the storm that is the delicious exodus.
posted by heresiarch at 12:43 PM on December 16, 2010 [1 favorite]


Best answer: A friend of mine built unalog and that's what I've been using instead of delicous for a long time. It's open source [pretty sure] so you could host/install it yourself.
posted by jessamyn at 12:44 PM on December 16, 2010 [1 favorite]


Response by poster: According to these articles (TechCrunch, AllThingsDigital), Delicious will be closed down.

I've been using Delicious for saving/curating bookmarks and for discovery. In my Delicious "network" are some old friends, some old colleagues, and some people who bookmark things interesting to me. It's almost a personal magazine, and not unlike Metafilter (hit ratio is probably the same).

So this question is also in small part: what's a social bookmarking service I should recommend to my friends?
posted by Prince_of_Cups at 12:49 PM on December 16, 2010


I just signed up for pinboard myself while the price is still low.
posted by togdon at 12:55 PM on December 16, 2010


I'm glad you asked this question because I was about to ask it as well. I may look at installing unalog on my server, but I do like the social aspects of delicious.
posted by rmd1023 at 12:56 PM on December 16, 2010


I signed up for Pinboard 18 months ago, synced it with my Delicious, and promptly totally forgot about it. I'm going to switch over to it now. Unfortunately, it's not free, but it does seem very good upon a cursory poke around inside.
posted by Magnakai at 1:05 PM on December 16, 2010


Everyone's Bookmarks for: Is Yahoo Shutting Down Del.icio.us?

Well, crap. Where are my nearly 15000 bookmarks going to go now? Let me check my bookmarking tag. Hmm, not much:

Here's a pinboard blog article about the difference between the paid alternatives (diigo, pinboard, historious).

There's also Google Bookmarks.

What's pinboard's import process like?
posted by zamboni at 1:06 PM on December 16, 2010


Zootool just got a big fat recommend from Jon Hicks. Site is down.
posted by circular at 1:13 PM on December 16, 2010


I wanted to use google bookmarks, but I can't figure out how to keep my delicious tags upon import. =/ (And seriously, Chrome Bookmarks can't be automagically linked to Google Bookmarks easily? Makes me wonder if Google Bookmarks will die soon, too.)
posted by xyzzy at 1:21 PM on December 16, 2010


Pinboard's import turns out to be very easy. I too signed up for an account when they were about a dollar and then forgot about it (what a business plan!) but am kind of glad to get to use it now, even if the toolbar feature doesn't seem to exist. Bookmarklets aren't the same.
posted by carbide at 1:37 PM on December 16, 2010


Pinboard's twitter feed, if you're into that kinda thing.
posted by mullacc at 1:39 PM on December 16, 2010


I just made the jump to Pinboard. Import process is a piece of cake, although it is still processing my bookmarks - I have to think their servers are hammered right about now. Pinboard can also mirror your delicious bookamrks (public only?), so you can continue to use delicious until they pull the plug.
posted by misterbrandt at 1:45 PM on December 16, 2010


Response by poster: I've completed a successful import to Pinboard.
I'm waiting on account creation at Zootools.
Glass just reminded me it exists, but it is more an "extroverts' happy hour" than bookmarking service.
posted by Prince_of_Cups at 1:59 PM on December 16, 2010


I have just been looking into Scuttle, which appears to be a self-hosted delicious-like service, in case this news has you fearing the sanctity of the cloud.
posted by EL-O-ESS at 2:00 PM on December 16, 2010 [2 favorites]


I know it doesn't exactly fit within the scope of the rest of the site, but a new subsection along the lines of links.metafilter.com would be particularly awesome.
posted by tapeguy at 2:17 PM on December 16, 2010 [3 favorites]




Just got an email about XMarks, too -- they have been acquired by LastPass and are not going to be shutting down. So there's another option, not sure what they might have in mind to flesh out the service.
posted by circular at 2:43 PM on December 16, 2010


I'm signing up for Diigo and Pinboard, to see which I like better.

I wish Delicious had introduced a pay option to support its longevity. These days, anything I care about, I'm happy to pay for.
posted by frykitty at 3:45 PM on December 16, 2010 [3 favorites]


Response by poster: If you're migrating to Pinboard, here is a MeTa thread on username swapping.
posted by Prince_of_Cups at 4:02 PM on December 16, 2010 [1 favorite]


Evernote might be a solution for some folks, but it's a bit heavyweight for just URLs. I have it on my work PC, my Mac and my Android phone so this just might work for me. YMMV.
posted by tommasz at 4:05 PM on December 16, 2010 [2 favorites]


Best answer: I imported all my delicious bookmarks to ever note. It prevents the dead link problem by storing the content, not just the URL. It's a pig of a program, though.
posted by leotrotsky at 4:10 PM on December 16, 2010


Best answer: I have something of a different situation. I've been using Delicious more as a linkblog. Every week I tag various things in Delicious and then I have a script that grabs the week's worth and posts them to my site, like so:

http://www.daveexmachina.com/wordpress/?p=4772

So for a replacement, I don't give a jack about the social aspect of it. Honestly, I don't even care about the aggregate part of it; I almost never went to my Delicious page and looked at old stuff. I'm looking at it strictly for automatic linkblogging purposes. I'd like something that stores up links and regurgitates them automatically on Saturdays.

I thought about a Tumblr for this, but I have two concerns. First, I don't know if I could do any kind of "This Week on My Tumblr" aggregation in WordPress. Second, given how on the ball Tumblr is, I can see myself having to make another move in another year or so.

Any ideas? I think maybe I need to look for a different beast altogether.
posted by Legomancer at 4:57 PM on December 16, 2010


Best answer: Every week I tag various things in Delicious and then I have a script that grabs the week's worth and posts them to my site

Does the script use the del.icio.us API?
Pinboard offers a full API, modeled on v1 of the del.icio.us API, which you can find documented on their website.

Simply replace the endpoint in the examples with https://api.pinboard.in/.
posted by zamboni at 5:00 PM on December 16, 2010


Best answer: People have been discussing this over at Quora as well. The two big suggestions that didn't come up here: trailmeme and pearltree. The guys who started both projects talks about them a little bit.
posted by jessamyn at 5:54 PM on December 16, 2010 [2 favorites]


favbot seems to be a new startup that claims to have some interesting features.

Favbot saves and organizes your browsing history. It figures out the best labels to use for each web page. It understands what websites are important to you. It predicts what other websites you will be interested in.... Powerful machine-learning algorithms at work

But they provide so little info on exactly what it does that I'm not even going to try it right now.

I've joined the hordes migrating to Pinboard for now.

Re The demise of Delicious, I notice the Yahoo slide has the heading "Sunset". That might not imply an imminent shutdown, it could be more a gradual phaseout, or even a sell off or spin out. In the end it just means "We're going to get shot of this thing, it doesn't belong in our business".

This question asks Yahoo to open source it.
posted by philipy at 6:47 PM on December 16, 2010


I was reading the wikipedia list and found givealink.org. It was created at Indiana University and is funded by the National Science Foundation. The "donation" they solicit from you upon signing in for the first time is just asking you to share your bookmarks. I just signed up and imported my stuff from delicious. I got an error, but when I went to my tags page, they were all there.
posted by soelo at 8:40 PM on December 16, 2010 [4 favorites]


I haven't tested this, but looks interesting: a javascript bookmarklet which uploads exported Delicious bookmarks to a Google Bookmarks account.
posted by Busy Old Fool at 2:57 AM on December 17, 2010 [4 favorites]


ask.me hijack:

Is there a way to keep two services synchronized - I signed up for Pinboard but also Diigo. I'd like to be able to have mirroring bookmarks at both services. How to?
posted by filmgeek at 10:40 AM on December 17, 2010


I couldn't make sense givealink.org's interface to actually see my bookmarks, meh.
Also, there is this news from ReadWriteWeb that it's not going away but will likely be sold or spun off.
posted by soelo at 2:06 PM on December 17, 2010


Best answer: People are suggesting Pinboard a lot. I have heard great things about it but it's still...a company.

Pinboard's "a company" in the same way Metafilter or Instapaper is. A couple of guys solving a problem for themselves and giving it to the world at a price that lets them keep working on it.

It doesn't hurt that those couple of guys are former Delicious developers from the pre-Yahoo days, either.
posted by mendel at 6:22 PM on December 17, 2010


I hope this isn't hijacking, but I keep the vast majority of my (3,000+) Delicious bookmarks marked as private - will importing them into Pinboard or Diigo "declassify" them, or will the privacy rating stay intact?
posted by mostly vowels at 7:13 PM on December 17, 2010


I've imported into pinboard- privacy settings and dates transferred correctly.
posted by zamboni at 7:18 PM on December 17, 2010 [1 favorite]


Lifehacker covered this today, but they are now reporting that Delicious is NOT closing. I stilll have hopes for Delicious, and, if it doesn't close down and isn't changed, I think it's the best bookmarking service that I've worked with.. mostly because of its minimalist approach.
posted by Mael Oui at 10:36 PM on December 17, 2010


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