As I mentioned on my previous post, our LIBR 246 class used several social bookmarking web applications as activities for this week. A comparison between two social bookmarking sites was required for submission and I choose to compare del.icio.us and Furl. I recommended del.icio.us and the reasons for that are on the assignment submitted to Prof. Faires. Here is an excerpt of that report:
“Del.icio.us is easy to use, robust, and intuitive. Both del.icio.us and Furl started in 2003 but the former has a more mature implementation, look, and layout. Sign up is done in seconds and tagging and sharing of resources can be done immediately after. The layout is clean and devoid of third party advertisements on its page, while Furl on the other hand has two rows of ads from Google on its page. It would be unseemly to have third party advertisement in a resource sharing web application to be used by staff whether it is internal or shared with the public…
“…Based on this author’s user experience, more people are actively participating and tagging in the del.icio.us community, with some groups numbering active users in the thousands, compared to some groups in Furl that only has one member.”
Another social bookmarking site the class tried is Library Thing. This is similar to another web application, GoodReads, wherein you build a database of books you have read or reading, tag, rate, and/or review them and share them to the community found in the site.
my Library Thing account
Library Thing provides recommendations based on your tags and you get leads of what else might be an interesting read. I already have an account on GoodReads although I have not really organized, tagged or rated the books that I have added on that site. I see using any of the two web application in the future after further exploration in the future, suffice it to say that I see some value and utility of these Web 2.0 tool for me as a student, professional or just as a book lover. Some interesting facts about Library Thing that I got from its site – is that there are already more than 69,000 members as of this time that added more than 36.6 million books of which they used 46.9 million tags to describe them. That is just awesome.