This post is essentially a set of thinking notes for a post I’m preparing for Web Worker Daily on the phenomenon (is that the right word in this context) of multiple Web 2.0/social computing applications sharing the same market space. We see it in the social bookmarking space particularly, where we have del.icio.us, ma.gnolia, Google bookmarks, diigo, blinklist, BlueDot, etc., but it’s no different in pretty much every other vertical.
You can see what I’m getting at by taking a quick look at Judi Sohn’s “Head To Head” series at WWD.
Sure, each of the sites differentiates itself from the others by offering a different approach to what is essentially the same problem, but at the end of the day, the Web 2.0 market is awash with services that share increasingly crowded vertical spaces.
As web workers we’re often inclined to use, if only briefly, many of these services. Sometimes you end up with the problem I have - deep buy-in on two (or more) services in essentially the same space. Read on for my thoughts.
Anne Zelenka’s recent post on web-based bookmarking got me to thinking about the online bookmarking I do. It’s problematic for several reasons, not least of which is that I’m deeply committed to two different services - del.icio.us and ma.gnolia!
How did I get myself into this dilemma? How do I get out of it? Do I want to? Let’s talk.
It took me a long time to actually get into using online bookmarking, I just didn’t get it for a time. Then it clicked. It wasn’t just online bookmarking, it was social bookmarking. This is all very Web 2.0, but what it ended up being about for me was the ability to share my finds with friends and colleagues and have them do the same. This is one of the core reasons that online bookmarking services are so useful - it’s not so much the portability of your bookmarks (although that is important), but the ability to share and collaborate on the things you bookmark.
All the online bookmarking services are keyed to being able to do this sharing, so no one service has a lock in this space. Let’s count this out as a factor.
The first service I used was del.icio.us. Not surprising, it was one of the first social bookmarking services. I used it for a good 12 months before I started using ma.gnolia. So why use ma.gnolia? Well, I blame my friend Donna. She’s an internationally recognised expert on information architecture and an all-round smart cookie. She suggested I should check it out as it had some features that went beyond what del.icio.us had to offer.
So, I jumped in. I imported all my del.icio.us bookmarks to ma.gnolia (a very easy task that brings all your tags as well. Sweet!) and started playing. It’s a very different experience to del.icio.us - the Groups and discussions features in particular are very cool, enabling a much deeper social experience than del.icio.us. To my mind, it’s these features that are the most compelling reasons to consider ma.gnolia.
But what about del.icio.us? I had an established set of bookmarks there, as well as a number of contacts who regularly exchanged links using the for: method. I wasn’t about to stop bookmarking there. It’s here that the problem started… Parallel bookmarking on del.icio.us and ma.gnolia! Now every time I post a bookmark, I do it in two places.
After a few weeks I came to the view that maybe this whole parallel bookmarking thing wasn’t such a good idea. Unfortunately, by that time, I was hooked on ma.gnolia as my new social bookmarking service and had established several contacts there who weren’t using del.icio.us, or who were using the two services in a different way and not marking exactly the same things in both places.
So, how do I escape the curse of bookmarking on two social bookmarking services? Well, frankly, I don’t. I get value from both del.icio.us and ma.gnolia. I do have to think hard about ongoing approaches to the two. Maybe I use del.icio.us strictly for work-based linking, as it’s certainly more keyed in to just straight linking and sharing. And maybe ma.gnolia is for the more fun stuff? I haven’t yet decided, and in writing this article, I plan to chase my contacts who use both services and find out their motivations and methods. I’ll post about it here in the next few weeks.
In the meantime, how about you? Do you use more than one social bookmarking service? Which ones? Why? Let me know and I can include your feedback into a follow-up post.
The deep buy-in you are referring to is the cost of convincing your friends to “join” your tool and use it consistently. If all your friends are on delicious is doesn’t help if Magnolia is better.
With the release of the Facebook F8 Platform (for deep integration with Facebook), I expect to see a lot of convergence around Facebook, diminishing the importance of each tool’s own network. Yes, each network will have to migrate to Facebook, but as Facebook was designed a the “premier” social network, I don’t think there will be much pain. And once all networks are migrated to Facebook, each tool’s own social network will diminish in importance. (Until MySpace introduces their own deep integration platform and splits everyone’s network again… oh, well.)
Concerning your bookmarks, you may want to consider using a tool like JumpKnowledge (jkn.com) which allows you to annotate web pages before bookmarking them. JKN is integrated with del.icio.us and other bookmarking, blog, and email services (Not Magnolia. But don’t shoot me, it’ll be added shortly.)
Full disclosure: I am founder of JKN