Comparing Social Bookmarking Services

2008-04-05T15:29:00.004Z

The last post about my Procmail Quick Start being bookmarked 300 times at del.icio.us inspired me to look at other social bookmarking services and see how popular the Procmail Quick Start (PQS) is elsewhere. Here's what I found.

It seems that del.icio.us is where the nerds hang out and it makes sense that every time I look around for a better bookmarking service, I decide that del.icio.us is the best choice for me, at least for now. Of the alternate bookmarking services I just looked at, Simpy looks the most interesting, especially the link history page, which includes a graph.

What do you think? What social bookmarking service(s) do you use and why?

IUseThis: Social Networking for Nerds

2007-11-12T16:40:00.002Z

I pay a lot of attention to software as you can tell by looking at the sidebar on the Deflexion.com home page, where I list tools and services that I use or that I'm considering using. I recently started using osx.iusethis.com to track the Mac OS X software that I use. It's an easy way to find out about updates, to learn about tips & problems from other users, and to learn about other software that I might like. Lots of people blog about the OS X software that they use and I often bookmark such posts in my del.icio.us bookmarks with the tag OSX, but it's overwhelming to go through these posts and decide what software I might actually want to try. IUseThis is a fun way to browse through software lists and quickly get a sense of what software might be useful to me. To me, IUseThis is an example of social networking for nerds. If you're a nerd like me and wondering what all the excitement about social networking is about, I recommend that you try IUseThis or some other object-centric social network service.

To learn about social networking, see:

Social network service at Wikipedia.org
Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship by danah m. boyd and Nicole B. Ellison

To learn about the distinction between object-centric social networks and ego-centric social networks, see:

Social Network Transitions by Fred Stutzman

I'm mainly interested in using object-centric social networks, such as IUseThis and social bookmarking services, and my guess is that this is also the case for my fellow nerds.