Saturday, December 18, 2010

Not so Delicious After All


I hadn't paid much attention to Social Bookmarking Services in the past, but that all changed on Friday. Social Bookmarking been around for several years, however I've been very happy with the "old fashioned" & private way of just creating folders of bookmarks on my PC. I haven't seen a need to make my library of web resources public. But there are many people that do & rely on this resource which can be readily retrieved from anywhere ~ especially when you're on the go.

But seriously hard core Delicious users are suddenly shopping the competition & rushing to move their libraries of data to a more reliable source.

Competitor Diigo is already capitalizing on the rumors of the future of Delicious being in flux:

 Just in case you're not familiar, here's a quick & dirty download on some of the Diigo features including:
  • "My library" for doing web research, sharing on-line content & collaboration
  •  The ability to annotate w/highlighting, highlight & clip images, and even a "post-it notes" tool
  •  Use of a cloud online archive so you don't have to worry about web pages or .pdfs not being there when you use traditional bookmarks to find them again
  • Ability to download content for off-line browsing
  • Means to organize data w/multiple tags or lists which you can elect to share with others
  • Multiple back-ups of your online library
  • "My Network" - the means to create personal learning networks
  • Option of establishing group collaborative repository networks
  • Accessibility via mobile with ease
Instapaper is also a more simple option, without all the bells & whistles of a Delicious, Evernote or Diigo. According to the site FAQ, "Instapaper isn’t optimized for keeping track of thousands of pages. This isn’t the right tool to collect, categorize, tag, filter, and search the contents of every web page you’ve ever found."

Evernote is a recommended Delicious alternative as well for capturing organizing & finding saved items you're looking for fast. With this service it's not quite as easy as downloading a toolbar, you're downloading a desktop client application.

My question is does it make sense to have all your treasured bookmarks in one basket? Redundancy may be the sensible answer - although it's time consuming, it may be better than stressing about the what if scenarios of the future. It would be nice if someone could come up with a self hosted alternative that allowed you to back-up your library to your own personal cloud - perhaps even to the same place that you store your personal files like MozyHome.

In a volatile economy, especially one where in the same week Yahoo announced 600 layoffs, nothing is certain & no product is guaranteed to last forever.  Instead of sweating the possibility of being a victim of circumstance - get your disaster recovery plan in place & stay proactive with your options.  You'll be glad you did.

More posts inspired by Delicious Paranoia:

Web Uproar As Yahoo Shuts Down Delicious

Delicious is Dead. Now What?

17 Reasons Delicious.com Users Should Head to Diigo

10 Alternatives to Delicious

Yahoo Claims It’s Not Killing Delicious

What's next for Delicious?

If you liked this post, you might also enjoy: Inner Struggles

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I hopped over from BlogFrog and I'm glad I did. I'm a fan of Evernote. The other bookmark sites were simply too much to manage (and I'm habitually organized). Thanks for the post.