Pandia takes a look at the current online bookmarking scene and at alternatives to Delicious.

Once you have found a great tool or an important article online, you want to be able to find it again later. And anyone who works on more than one computer knows that using the browser’s bookmarking tool is more frustrating than helpful when that essential bookmark lies in the browser at work and you need it at home or vice versa.

Enter online bookmarking — a friend to web heads and information professionals alike. But the online bookmarking scene is going through fundamental changes. What should you do to keep your knowledge stash safe?

Social bookmarking was a thriving space with several excellent services. But Magnolia suffered a huge data loss two years ago and shut down.

Shortly after this, Furl was bought by Diigo and the two services merged. Another of my favorites, German Mister Wong, has recently closed its free service and replaced it with a pricing scheme that proves expensive for the avid bookmarker. And now Yahoo has sold Delicious.

Delicious

Delicious has been the most popular online bookmarking tool for years and my favorite. Yahoo acquired Delicious in 2005 and surprisingly allowed it to languish without much new innovation.

In December 2010, they announced that delicious was for sale. It was targeted to close, along with a score of other Yahoo properties: Altavista, Yahoo Picks, Yahoo Bookmarks, Yahoo Buzz, MyBlogLog, Alltheweb, and MyM.

Now Delicious has been acquired by Avos, a new Internet company, led by the founders of YouTube, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen. Yahoo says AVOS will begin managing Delicious around July 2011 but no plans for the new Delicious have been disclosed yet. It is said that AVOS is hiring aggressively.

Hurley, who is CEO of AVOS said to Wall street Journal: “We see a tremendous opportunity to simplify the way users save and share content they discover anywhere on the Web.” And AVOS promises your current Delicious account will remain free to use.

An avid Delicious user myself, I look to the launch of AVOS’ Delicious with mixed feelings: If they keep the simplicity and functionality that we know and love, I will stay on. And getting ready to transfer your bookmarks to AVOS requires you to accept their terms of service, which differ from those of Delicious in some important ways.

In case they don’t keep the functionality I have started looking for alternatives:

Diigo

Diigo is in many ways the strongest contender if you want an alternative to Delicious. Indeed, they have a special FAQ about transition from Delicious to Diigo.

Diigo is easy to use. It easy to navigate, sort and edit bookmarks and tags. I have 1000+ bookmarks, so this is important to me.

But this service is more than a bookmarking service. It is marketed as a cloud based personal information management system. In addition to bookmarks, you can store highlights, sticky notes, notes, images and documents. And you can store entire web pages. Diigo also integrates with iPhones, iPads and Android devices.

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).

But Diigo’s advanced features are not easy to use, even for seasoned online professionals. And it requires a toolbar, which is inconvenient, to say the least.

Twitter, Facebook and the like

Social bookmarking is not as hot as it used to be and not much innovation is taking place. One reason for this might be the hegemony of Delicious. Another is clearly the rise of all kinds of social networks (of which Delicious was among the first). Now, to share e.g. an article, a photo or a web app, most people are likely to go first to Twitter or Facebook.

But neither Twitter nor Facebook lets you search your own links or the links of any one user (Twitter advanced search does this, but it doesn’t search all your tweets, just the most recent).

So what do you do to re-access the info you have shared in social networks? SnapBird lets you search any Twitter users timeline, tweets, favorites and more. There is also a new alternative Twitter search engine called PostPost. But Trunk.ly is a tool that surpasses these in so many ways.

Trunk.ly connects to your social network and monitors and collects the links you share across the social web. But there’s more: It indexes the web pages these links point to, so you get your own personal search engine.

You can connect Trunk.ly to your accounts on Twitter, Facebook, Pinboard and Delicous — for as long as it lasts. You can also set it to harvest and index links from RSS feeds e.g. your favorite blog. I just started using Trunk.ly and it looks like it is going to be a useful tool.

Pinboard

Pinboard is a simple yet efficient bookmarking service similar to Delicious, which might be a place to go if you don’t like the AVOS terms of service.

Pinboard is a simplistic but useful bookmarking service “for introverts”, meaning that they do not put an equal emphasis on the social part of bookmarking. It is very powerful, though, and you can sync it with Delicious.