You probably browse the web from home, at work and possibly on your smartphone. If you do, storing bookmarks in the browser can be annoying and counterproductive. You need an online bookmarking tool to have easy access to all your favorite web sites regardless of which device you use to get online. Here are Pandia’s top 5 social bookmarking services.

Social bookmarking is like a quiet, clever sister among her fancy Web 2.0 siblings. YouTube and Facebook are so much fun; they get all the attention. But the social bookmarking services are in many ways much more useful for most people and they are equally social (or at least they could be).

Two years ago I wrote Pandia’s first Top 5 social bookmarking services article. Since then, some new services have appeared and some old players have disappeared. It is time for a fresh look and to select the definitive top 5 services for 2009.

What to look for

Over the years, I have registered with and tested over 30 tools for social bookmarking. The contestants were sorted by these criteria:

• A certain amount of users is essential. Otherwise the social aspect looses relevance.
• Advanced search tools is a must — before you know it, you have gathered hundreds of bookmarks.
• There has to be extensive documentation, FAQ and/or help pages.
• Import and export tools are important. Import is necessary for adding old bookmarks from your browser, export is important for backup (the Magnolia disaster has made the need for backup painfully evident). You also need export to ensure that your bookmarks can go with you to another service if you decide to switch.
• A good bookmarking service should have RSS feeds of users, tags, groups etc.
• A blog is good (although not strictly a requirement). I like to keep up to date about new features, bugs, bug fixes and more.

The top 5 social bookmarking services in this article all comply with these criteria. Here are the winners:

Diigo

Diigo is fun! It is my absolute favorite. This service has an enormous amount of tools and features — it is more than a bookmarking service, it is a complete tool for online research.

To start with the basics, Diigo is easy to use. Tabs and pull-down menus in addition to the tag cloud makes it easy to navigate, sort and edit bookmarks and tags. I have 1000+ bookmarks, so this is important to me. If you do research online, you’ll soon value these tools.

In addition to being a bookmark tool, Diigo lets you add sticky notes and highlight text on any web page just like you would on paper. This way, information can be highlighted on web pages for easy scanning later and snippets of information can be saved for sharing, editing and reference. The highlights and sticky notes are private by default, but can be shared with your Diigo friends in a number of ways.

The possibilities for social networking on Diigo are unequaled in the world of social bookmarking. Diigo has a group tool for collaborative research that allows groups of people to pool their findings through shared bookmarks, highlights, sticky notes, and forum discussions. There are also communities formed around web sites (like Wikipedia) and tags (like Web 2.0).

To learn more, have a look at this 4 minute introductory video.

Delicious

Delicious is owned by Yahoo. It is by far the most popular social bookmarking tool out there, but it is not rich in features. It is easy to use, though, and has a huge community, which makes it a very valuable tool.

After the redesign in the summer of 2008, Delicious has an improved search tool. The new search engine has some advanced options and is more social: You can choose to search within one of your tags, another user’s public bookmarks, or your Delicious network. This way it is easier to take advantage of the expertise of your Delicious friends and the Delicious community at large.

Another new feature is the action box. It is a contex sensitive tool that provides commonly used actions for the current page. This can be confusing at first (it breaks with the web convention of consistent navigation), but once you get used to it, it is very convenient.

There are no very powerful tools for sorting or editing bookmarks. Paradoxically, this might be a reason for del.icio.us’ popularity. It offers just what the average web surfer needs.

Furl

Furl is part of the Looksmart family and has been around forever (like Delicious, Furl launched in 2003).

It has a solid security policy (the importance of this has been highlighted after Ma.gnolia crashed and lost most of the boomarks of its users) and advanced sorting, searching and editing tools.

Furl not only saves your bookmarks, but archives a copy of the page you bookmark. You can search the full text your archived items — a powerfull tool. Users have 5 gigabytes of storage space which allows for storing tens of thousands of items.

Like Amazon, Furl provides recommedations. These are web pages that may interest you, based on the sites you’ve already saved.

Furl has some nice social features too. The most powerful of these is the group tool. You can start a group or join existing ones — Furl recommends groups based on your bookmarks. While all of these five services offer widgets that let you show your latest bookmarks on your blog or Web site, Furl even lets you send a daily email newsletter of links to friends and colleagues.

Mister Wong

Mister Wong is developed in Germany and is Europe’s largest bookmarking service. Though it started in German, Mister Wong is now available in English, Russian, Chinese, Spanish, and French.

If you navigate better by way of images than text, Mister Wong is for you: Each bookmark is represented by a thumbnail of the web page it links to in addition to the title and any description you add. If the thumb nail is too small to yield the necessary information — or if Mister Wong has failed to produce a thumb nail (this happens) — you can point your mouse to an icon next to the bookmark title to have a larger preview pop up.

Next to the preview icon is another useful tool: a star icon you can click to add a bookmark to your top bookmarks. These are always easily abailable from the bookmark menu.

Unfortunately, Mister Wong no longer supports groups. You can still be social and share bookmarks through a network of friends, called Buddies.

Simpy

Simpy is another old-timer in the world of social bookmarking. Unlike Furl , Simpy hasn’t updated its look much. This gives it an odd but cute retro look. This does not compromise ease of use, though.

In addition to storing your bookmarks, Simpy also stores notes. With the Note This! bookmarkletbookmarklet you highlight and save text. Notes are private and each note gets a title and you can add tags to it, just like the bookmarks. When searching, you can choose to search notes or bookmarks — your own or everyone’s.

Simpy supports groups, but you can’t add people as friends. In stead, Simpy has watchlists that let you subscribe to the bookmarks of other users. Simpy keeps track of new links that you have not yet seen and alerts you when a watchlist has new links. Another neat social feature is that when you add a bookmark to Simpy, you get the option to send the link to a friend in addition to saving it to saving it to your account. All you do is add a Simpy user name or an email address.

Of related interest
3 social bookmarking tools for research collaboration

photo credit: deardarling