A couple of years ago a friend of mine showed me a website he was working on. It was a site that allowed you to save a list of your favorite websites to a server, so that you could obtain a list of these sites no matter which computer you happened to be at. He told me it was fully functional, and he had even given a few test accounts out. When I saw it, I thought it was a pretty neat idea, though nothing revolutionary. Later that day I did a google search and discovered that there were already a couple of sites like that. “Hmm, looks like this idea has already been implemented pretty thoroughly…” And social bookmarking sites left my thoughts completely, until a week ago.

I frequent sites such as reddit.com. Mostly so I can get my daily dose of odd ball news and information. A lot of the sites that are posted on reddit are blogs, and lately I had been noticing that many of these blogs had these strange little buttons at the bottom of their entries. After having wondered what the hell they were for some time, I finally clicked on one out of curiosity and it took me to del.icio.us, a modern day social bookmarking site. I was actually kind of amazed that the site had become so popular that bloggers were posting a link to it in all of their posts. After some researching though, I figured out why.

• Social bookingmarking sites allow you to share your favorite links with friends and strangers. For website owners, this is free promotion, and people are much more likely to spend some time looking at a link on someone’s favorites list than they are to spend time looking at some random site they came across in a search engine.
• Links on social bookmarking sites actually get factored into your page rankings on most search engines. Thus, the more people who favorite your site, the higher your page is ranked.

The first point may be obvious, but the second point is probably the reason those little buttons have taken off. Search engines are a powerful tool in driving traffic to your site. It didn’t seem to make sense to promote some other site just for point 1, but with points 1 and 2 together you actually have a pretty nice combination.

Those little buttons have taken off so much that there are now sites that offer the service of providing you with the latest buttons. Sign up for an account on their site and you can have all the popular buttons easily placed on your blog or website. Check it out:

• http://blog.addthis.com/ – A plug-in you can get for WordPress. Has a nice little popup of notable bookmarking sites when you mouse over the button.
• http://badged.net/ – Free service that doesn’t require you to register an account. It looks like they survive by taking donations.

These seem like nice little services, but one has to ask themselves: How do these sites make money? My biggest fear with using a free service like the ones listed above is that they’d start putting ads everywhere once they got really popular. And the last thing I want for my visitors is for them to be greeted by some pop-up window, especially if I’m not making anything off of it. This may seem like a rather cynical thing to say, but most of the free services I’ve used in the past have all ended up being saturated with ads (geocities, xoom, various free counters I’ve had, and the list goes on).

For the moment, AddThis appears to be looking at data mining as a possible income generator:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/03/05/addthis-widget-gathering-lots-of-interesting-data/

Badged may be doing the same thing, but they don’t say anything about keeping track of clicks on their website. Personally, I actually prefer Badged’s setup. It’s nice to be able to choose which buttons you want. However, it’d be a lot nicer if there was no dependence on the main site. For example, after you selected the buttons you’d like, it’d generate the HTML for you and you’d simply right click and save the icons to your computer. That way there’s no chance of people putting ads on your site and no chance of them mining data from your users. I like that idea so much I may do it myself, maybe.

In the meantime, I’ve decided to put two social bookmarking buttons on my TAAG program. Just to see how that goes. TAAG will also be getting an update later in the week. To give you a hint, I’ve been reading up on AJAX.

As for my friend, to my knowledge, he didn’t really do anything with his bookmarking site, which is kind of a shame, since it was a neat enough site to leave an impression on me.