Linkwad…do multi-tasking!!

Linkwad is exclusive! No, I am not talking about its features here. By ‘exclusive’ I mean that the services of Linkwad are provided exclusively to the Mozilla’s Firefox web browser users. It’s a social bookmarking website which allows you to bookmark your favorite webpages, save them and then gives you the option to retrieve them once again whenever you feel like. And by now I am sure you know that there is absolutely nothing new about this website.

However, one can’t really deny the fact that some of its present features are really helpful for the users. But, on the other hand, its users even wish that there was something more to Linkwad.
The Linkwad sneak peek

The name of this website can be best understood if we divide the same into two halves. ‘Link’ obviously means your ability to link your favorite webpages together and be able to save them and ‘wad’ means a group of links that are saved under a single name. The credit for the creation of this website goes to Nick Fridrich. The website was first launched on August 28, 2006 and since then it has constantly evolved to make itself better. For this very purpose, nearly five different versions have been launched, each better from its previous one. But as they say- “there are many more miles before you sleep”. Linkwad surely needs to go a long way before it can actually outrun its competitors.

The features

A few of the features of Linkwad surely make it worth an install! As soon as you register yourself at Linkwad, an additional toolbar is added to your Mozilla Firefox window. It is using this toolbar that you can work on multiple tabs at once without having to switch between your favorite websites’ windows. When you across a page that you wish to save, just simple hit on the ‘save’ button on your Linkwad toolbar, and your job is done.

Another interesting thing about this website is that you get to access the results from search engines like Google and Yahoo as well. Moreover, this search shall not only give you links related to your keywords entered but shall also give you links related to those results found as well.

You can customize your keyboard shortcuts and can easily drag and drop tabs between different wads. You are also free to rate different wads according to your opinion. Feel free to see other people’s wads and make them your own if they interest you. Share with the Linkwad users, your own wads, if you wish to. And just like any other site, this one too allows you to access your bookmarks through any computer with Linkwad.

The defects include that people wish to install just a button and not an entire toolbar. Moreover, they feel that if others are offering the same things and more to them (like compatibility with other browsers like Internet Explorer etc.), then why should they stick to this one.

Whether this site is worth an install, you decide!

GiveAlink…caters your interests

You think this one is a social bookmarking site…well, not really! This one does involve bookmarks, sharing and all the other things related to any other bookmarking site, but there’s more. There is mathematics, research, formulae, semantics, analysis, correlation etc. No, you are not reading about any science lab or any of its experiments but of a social bookmarking site that has a scientific base and methodology!

What exactly it does

When you first go and check out GiveALink.org, its going to be hard for you to understand what it is all about and what it really does. Let me make this easier for you. GiveAlink works in order to search for different alternatives to the central search algorithms i.e. it works to find out new and innovative methods breaking all the rules of conventional searching (by search engines). There are complicated procedures involved in this task, including formulae, correlation, collaborative filtering and so on. No wonder, this is all too complicated in itself.

How it does what is does

The sub head is itself a bit confusing. And thus is in perfect sync with our topic of discussion. Now jokes apart and on a serious note. GiveALink asks its users to donate their bookmarks to them. GiveALink system then analyzes these bookmarks using a scientific collaborative filtering technique and the hierarchical structure of the bookmark files and folders. This technique is used to give them an estimate of the semantic similarity of those bookmarked URLs. The basic assumption on which this site’s theory works is that they believe that individuals who have shared the same tastes in the past will continue to have the same tastes even in the future.

‘The’ difference

The difference between GiveALink and other search engines is that while other search engines gives you the results by using text analysis tool i.e. they analyze the keyword(s) entered by you and on the basis of that give you the result. On the other hand, GiveALink proposes similarity measures for URLs using both hierarchical structure of bookmark files and folders and also collaborative filtering across all users. Thus, after calculating similarity between, GiveALink makes guesses about the topic and displays results of what it thinks might interest you. This is done by assuming that what others, who are like you, like, you might even like the same thing. And this is obviously done by analyzing the bookmarks that its users donate to them.

The more novel thing about GiveALink is that its results are not only texts or HTML format stuff, but also that it might even include movie feeds, JavaScript, and may be only images or URLs containing images.

This site does something we commonly know as a ‘Case Study’. It studies you on the basis of bookmarks submitted by you and then relates them to other users and their bookmarks. And the rest follows. All I can say is that if you are bored of using Google, Yahoo or MSN, then a shift to this might be interesting and refreshing.

Furling??? …It’s too simple!

Furl…yet another social bookmarking site. So… what’s new in this one? Simply nothing. It’s just like its contemporaries and offers no special features to its users. Neither does it focus on any special particular section of population like Connotea, nor does it displays the peer- reviewed links on the homepage like CiteULike. Still, its users love it. And that’s because of its sheer simplicity.

The Furl team offers you services in various different domains. Lets briefly and ‘simply’ discuss each of these so that it’s easier for you to make your own judgment about Furl and whether you should use it or not.

Furl allows you to save a webpage and then this webpage is stored on an archive. This means that you can access it even when the website server is down. Tagging or assigning topics to a particular webpage or to a group of similar webpages can be done. Performing bulk actions, adding comments, clippings and personal ratings (from one to five) and link validation are some of the features most loved by its users.

The Furl search system indexes the URLs that you publicly save. Thus, searching and sharing becomes really easy. People can send the links to their friends through e-mails and that to with just a click of a button.

Furl allows you to search your own webpage index. You can thus search for a particular bookmark quickly without scrolling through the bookmark list. You can also search using ‘topics’ or ‘keywords’ or ‘tags’. The customization of search is possible.

Just like other social bookmarking websites, you can see the list of others who have saved the same page as yours, other pages saved by them etc. The only different thing here is that Furl recommends you the links to some of the topics that might interest you. This is done on the basis of your activity on their site.

You can declare a particular tag or topic ‘private’ to prevent it from being viewed by others. You can also specify your preferences if you do not wish your ‘public tags’ to be available through the Furl search engine.

Importing and exporting through different sites and browsers is really very easy. Furl supports a variety of formats to make your work easier. No one else can match the service of getting RSS feeds from this site, for sure.

The minor problem that the users of this site face and which they wish to change is the thumbnail view of their bookmarks. They would even love to have a side bar indicating which other users have bookmarked which other similar kind of pages which might be of use to them.

In totality, Furl is a simple social bookmarking website with no extraordinary features. And if one you are one of those people who believe in the motto- ‘Simple living and high thinking’, then this side is undoubtedly made to serve you. So go ahead and have fun with Furl!

Connotea - Jack of all trades but a master of just One!

When it comes to competition, a social bookmarking site does everything to make itself different from its contemporaries. And why not…its becoming harder than ever for them to make their presence felt in the cyber world. They all try a variety of things, but what works for them in a sure shot manner is ‘specialization’ and that too in a way that they cater to not everyone on this planet (that’s not humanly possible!) but target only a specific kind of audience. Being the master of all trades is not possible and being the jack of all trades won’t give any returns. So why not become a jack of all trades and a master of just one!

The Nature Publishing Group must have bound itself to the above statement while coming up with the idea of creating their own social bookmarking site. Its result was Connotea- ‘the’ social bookmarking site for scientists, researchers and medical librarians. However, one thing that should be noted at this point of time is that when this site claims to be serving the scholar part of the population, it does not mean that it does not serve the others. It simply has more a few more features to help the former. Take for example the metadata capabilities that it has or the fact that scientists, clinicians and the medical librarians are likely to find their peers and colleagues or people with same or similar interests…all these and more such features favour the scholar group more than any body else.

How Connotea functions

Getting started with Connotea is extremely easy. It takes the user hardly a few minutes to get himself/herself registered. Since no kind of downloading is needed, a user can just get on with bookmarking his/her favorite pages without wasting even an extra minute. The ‘browser button’ allows you to bookmark with a single click. And adding tags is also extremely easy. Moreover, single and multi word tags are also possible. As for the citation or the bibliographic details that you wish to add to your reference, Connotea would itself add this kind of information wherever possible, i.e. for recognized links.

Key features at a glance

· The references of each user can be accessed through any computer because they are all saved on the internet itself. All you simply need to do is to log into your account.

· Sharing references with your friends is just a matter of seconds. Just e-mail them the link of the pages that you wish them to see.

· You don’t need to switch programs while saving references.

· You can use any number of tags and save any number of references.

· It allows users to enter a digital object identifier (DOI) number to instantly bookmark the corresponding full-text article as well.

This one is a typical bookmarking site and offers the same thing to you that even the others also offer. But if you are one of those looking out of science literature and related stuff… there is no other better place for you than Connotea.

Yahoo!…This is ‘Delicious’

It is believed that after Yahoo! acquired Delicious on December 9, 2005, the entire scene of social networking and social bookmarking got revolutionized. It is also believed that even after so many websites offering the facilities of tagging, saving, sharing etc. almost for a decade, delicious offered its users something more. But what ‘delicious’ offer in reality is what we decided to find out!

The domain name ‘Delicious’ is very catchy and is itself successful in driving in more and more users. Still, in order to attract more traffic towards its website, Delicious introduced quite a number of new features. One can view the most popular or the most recently posted links, right from the homepage, with the help of what is called the ‘hotlist’ or the ‘tags to watch’. Apart from this, the feature to look out for is the one with the help of which a particular user’s entire collection of bookmarks can be viewed by simply typing in his/her username. Take for instance, all you have to do is to type in- ‘http:/del.icio.us/username’ to view this user’s collection.

One of its most revolutionizing feature is that it allows the users to categorize or classify their data using their own vocabulary.This process of tagging a website using one’s own criteria or vocabulary is known as folksonomy (folk + taxonomy).

The other advantages of using ‘delicious’ are that it can be accessed from any computer in the world, with any operating system; it is absolutely free; it requires no special knowledge and is, thus, easy to use; and more than anything else… its absolutely free!

Where one sees folksonomy as a major plus point of this website, in some cases it just might act as the other way around. It sometimes just becomes impossible to control the use of the vocabulary and thus creates chaos and confusion.Since its founder Joshua Schachter created this site in 2003, no efforts have been made to standardize the database. The lack of precision by the user might just lead him/her to any place else than what he/she was looking for, at the very first place.

Moreover, since this site contains a huge number of links, thus browsing through available information gets even more tough.

The delicacies offered at this place are surely different from its contemporaries and yes, even better priced. Oops…it’s free! Despite the fact that, like every other social networking and bookmarking site, even this site is not error free…still, I suggest there is no harm in grabbing its one quick bite. You might just develop a taste for it and say that it is rather yummy…or perhaps- ‘Delicious’.

Bookmark Sync - Bookmarking with style, sync and difference

In what can be called the era of social networking and bookmarking, this website ‘Bookmark Sync’ surely has a place of its own. This is mainly due to the fact that this website not only gives its users an opportunity to bookmark their favorite webpages, share them, save them and tag them but it also allows you to synchronize them (bet you guessed that!)

Synchronizing Your Favorites

Nobody ever sits on the same PC every time. And it’s obviously possible that you might come across a webpage that you would wish to add to your list of favorites when you are not working, browsing or surfing the net from your own computer. This is exactly where ‘Bookmark Sync’ comes into use. Whichever browser and whichever PC or whichever operating system you use does not matter. This is because when you run Bookmark Sync on any system, another small program gets located on your desktop task bar that monitors the browser. And thus any changes are automatically made to the central server. In this way all the bookmarks get synchronized. This site scores above its rivals on this very point. The others store the links onto the server and if the server goes down the accessibility to your favorite bookmarks is lost.

Synchronizing from every PC is allowed, but the glitch remains that when you subscribe to Bookmark Sync, it allows you to bookmark 100 or less number of times and that to only from three different PCs. However, if you wish to bring into use more than three PCs, the subscription price varies accordingly.

Bookmarking is fine and is possible using any of the social networking sites. But, ‘Bookmark Sync’ offers its users something more than that. Not only tagging is possible using this website, but tagging clusters is also possible. Bookmark Sync helps you to organize and classify your similar kind of a data under a same cluster and bookmark them as it is. Features like the provision of bookmark ratios, in order to search results, or the software supporting multiple languages or facility of local backup or easy restore of data etc. also makes Bookmark sync unique.

The credit for this website goes to its founders- Michael Berneis and who founded it in November 1998 and it was made available to the masses in March 1999. Sadly after a server failure in September 2003, this website was open-sourced and is currently managed by the source code repository company ‘SourceForge’. Currently the rights of this website lie with Jack Deans who also runs Sync2It.com.

Bookmark Sync has over the years successfully catered to its customers. They have paid the highest amount of attention to the privacy of the users i.e. sharing of their stuff is not possible unless one authorizes it. So this site does prove to be worth a try. You never know, this might just be that perfect social networking and bookmarking site that you have always been looking for!

Blue Dot

A social network is undoubtedly, one of the most important part of the present day cyber world. A social network arises from the basic need of interdependency, be it in the form of friendship or even trade. Since, almost everyone today is into social networking and is a member of atleast one of these many available social networking sites, social book marking as a method to organize, store and share data is also very popular.

Blue Dot however is different. It’s not a social networking website but a social bookmarking and networking software. In case you haven’t heard of this software, its only because Blue Dot changed its name to Faves in October, 2007. Blue Dot was co-founded in Seattle, Washington in 2004 by Mohit Srivastava and Sumit Sen. However, its website “ Bluedot.us” was launched in June, 2006.

How ‘Faves’ social networking functions

The most convenient and the most loved feature of this website is that every time its registered user visits the Faves homepage, they see their ‘bookmarks’ i.e. they are able to easily view a summary of whatever things their friends have viewed or whatever has been shared among them.

Using Faves, its users are easily able to bookmark their favorite pages online. It means that they are able to save the URLs (uniform resource locator) of the webpages on the internet, and thus are able to view them whenever they like to and moreover they can share them with their friends.

How ‘Faves’ work

Since this social bookmarking as well as social networking website is a private website, thus, obviously, its sole aim is to earn profits. And these profits are achieved through sales. What ‘Faves’ sells are the ‘dotted’ websites and these are sold through what we call as the ‘affiliate marketing’ program.

An affiliate market, however, is like a middleman between publishers (affiliates) and merchants. This kind of a market allows publishers to find the best suitable affiliate program for their websites. And these programs are inturn capable of making them successfully reach their target audience by the use of the special services provided by them. These services are different for affiliates and for merchants. Take for example- the service of payment processing is provided to the merchants and the service of payment aggregation is made available to the affiliates. Both the affiliates as well as the merchants are free to choose services or affiliate programs that suit them the best. The fee paid by the merchants or the traders or the businessmen is the profit earned by Blue Dot.

Blue Dot or Faves like any other social bookmarking website allows its users to bookmark their favorite pages, to share them, to tag them etc. But the difference remains that this work is done by Faves with a dash of innovation, which makes this social bookmarking website a clear favorite among its Faves users.

Just How Useful is CiteULike?

Social bookmarking forms the basis of this website called CiteULike. So what’s new in that? There are many more websites which help us organize, store, manage and search bookmarks on the Internet just like this one. Then what is so different about CiteULike? The answer lies in its specialization.

CiteULike, unlike any of its cotemporaries, focuses on the sharing of basically scholarly papers, research papers or scientific references amongst people. These people can make use of the specific tools which CiteULike has designed for these very purposes.

The Functioning

CiteULike allows you to select any paper on the web browser and then add that to your personal library. The best part about this website is that you don’t have to type in the citation details yourself. This website does this work automatically. Since your personal library is saved on the web browser itself, you can access it from any computer in the world that has an Internet connection. The question whether your library is safe on the Internet or not, holds no value. This website is managed by a professional datacentre that backs up the database every night. So your library remains absolutely safe. Moreover, CiteULike deletes ‘Spam’ automatically the moment it is detected.

You can group all the related papers in your library using tags. CiteULike allows you to apply the same tag to as many papers you want. This makes the cataloguing of the papers a cakewalk.

Making the ‘Homepage’ Appearance

Not every other paper makes it to this website’s homepage. Only the ones that are peer-reviewed and from a recognized journal or from any of the links, that are supported by this website, makes it to the homepage.

This helps the website to filter any unwanted or untrue piece of information as well as in the detection of any kind of Spam. People who think that this is the place to advertise because of the sake of the convenience of its users, it allows the entry to various search engines…then they are wrong. Any such material is eradicated from the website as soon as it is found and thus, this keeps the website clutter free.

Moreover, this site does not help people to promote any of their smart works. They are obviously allowed to get them posted and if anyone would find them interesting enough, then it shall be bookmarked. Thus, this site indirectly guarantees to be fair.

The Extra Edge

The biggest advantage that this has is that it is ‘social’. You have features that make you share your library or bibliographies with others, or to find out who all are reading the same papers as you, or to simply send invitations to your friends to make them read what you think would be beneficial to them. It allows you to see what others have publicly posted (since you have the option to privately post them as well), what comments they have given, add bookmarklets to directly refer or link to other common website etc.

More than anything else…this site is a wonderful resource for all especially the science lovers. The more one uses it, works on it, the more he/she benefits from it. Let’s all get started!

The Digg Effect

Ever wondered where the culture of social networking sites came from? Did you ever think what the inspiration of these websites was? Well, the answer is Digg. You don’t think I haven’t spelt the word right? Well…no mistakes here… it is actually ‘Digg’. It came into existence in November, 2004 and revolutionized the Internet use. Prior to this, the Internet was used only to extract information and advertising, but later it become the fastest ever medium to be in touch with your friends, share everything with them that you ever wanted to and more than anything else, to freely express your opinion (affirmative or negative) over an issue. The Internet today has become the voice of a true democratic country in the true sense of the term.

How it works?

The idea behind Digg was to dig stories. Digg was launched for the sole purpose of providing people a platform where they could share content from anywhere on the Internet. This could be done by submitting the respective links on this website. Then people were given the option to ‘Digg’ a particular story if they liked it, i.e. they could vote for the story. This was termed as digging. The stories which were digged the maximum then appeared on the front page. Owing to its huge popularity, ‘Digg’ later started with giving its users the option of ‘burying’ a story in case they didn’t like it i.e. they were given the option of voting negatively for a story.

Developments

‘Digg’, since its inception in 2004, has launched two new versions in 2005 and in 2006 respectively. This was done, again, due to its huge popularity. Many new features were added in the upgraded versions like having different categories for different kind of stories e.g. science, business, etc.

Criticisms

However, Digg has its own share of criticisms as well. The critics have put forth a number of points which make you actually think…yes, this site is really not that fair to its users. Critics claim that since its members have mostly all the control over its content, misleading information or wrong information is being posted many a times. Also, it has been found that all the members are not being allowed to post their stories. The accusation is that Digg gets paid for placing stories on the first page. Moreover, the stories which are not in accordance with particular members’ or communities’ views are often ‘buried’ and thus the freedom of being in a democratic country is taken away to an extent. Its users have also been heard commenting that this website also imposes censorship and that whatever negatives you say about their sponsors never gets into the public eye.

In a nutshell

Despite all the criticisms, the credit, that Digg has lead to the present day social networking, cannot be taken away from it. The concept which Digg gave birth to was something so innovative that it did lead to its competitors like Yahoo and Google launching similar things on the similar lines. Go and try out your hand at this. It might just be worth it!