Nodal Bits

The year 2010 may have marked the demise of social media bookmarking services. Quite a few bookmark sharing services were discontinued last year. Simpy, Gnolia, and Backflip were just some of the best-known ones.

In their heyday, some of these services may have been considered to be the next big thing in online social media plays, but something changed in the past few years, making their usage begin to decline and they became less-preferred by venture capitalists.

Probably the biggest impact to them was the growing dominance of Facebook. People are using Facebook to share links with one another, and also using the “Like” button more to collect connections to content.

One might have thought that there were too many bookmarking services, so it would be natural for some of them to die off since the marketplace couldn’t support so many. However, it emerged in the past month that the longtime poster-child of bookmarking services, Delicious, is apparently going to be killed-off by Yahoo!, according to a leaked slide of services the company is planning to sunset.

Delicious was widely considered to be the most successful of social media bookmark sharing services, and it helped to pioneer the concept of user-tagging of content and folksonomy development.

I think it’s a shame that Delicious and these other bookmarking services are ending up in the internet graveyard. They could have been evolved into matching up better with users’ needs and continued to be viable. For instance, if they’d been transformed into being URL shortening services in addition to saving and searching URLs, they might have increased usage along with Twitter. I imagine the usage of Bit.ly may now dwarf the usage of all of these dead/dying services, combined.

I’m going to miss these bookmarking services — they were fun as well as useful to online marketers.

 
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Tags: bookmarking services

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 5th, 2011 at 7:30 am and is filed under Helpful Tools, Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.