del.icio.us vs. Google Bookmarking
Web based tools should be important to anyone who spends most of their lives “connected.” For me, it is important to keep as much of what I do as possible online. It just makes life easier when I use machines other then my own. Even setting up a new machine is a lot easier since so few tools need to be installed. Most of the tools I need and use regularly can all be found on one website or another. So it wasn’t long till I realized my bookmarks should be as accessible and online with everything else.
del.icio.us fits the bill perfectly. I wanted to see if there was anything better out there and found a lot. But the only other one that stood out as simple and as useful was Google Bookmarks. So naturally I had to do a shoot out between the two. I spent a few days bookmarking in both tools to see which one came out on top.
Both del.icio.us and Google Bookmark are nearly identical in tagging pages. They both provide easy bookmarking directly from the web browser. del.icio.us even goes so far as to have a nice plugin for Firefox which adds del.icio.us to the search bar, provides a tagging button, a link to your bookmarks in your menu, a del.icio.us toolbar menu, and tagging from context menus. This doesn’t really set del.icio.us apart from Google but it does provide for a more streamlined setup with access to a lot more then just tagging pages.
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If you compare the pages used to bookmark/tag a web page, they look almost identical.
At this point It’s rather difficult to see which product provides any advantages. So let’s take a look at how to access bookmarked pages from the respective website. Google hands down has the superior looking layout. It’s simple, organized, and quick to adapt to. del.icio.us doesn’t really give that same feeling. But it’s not bad.
Searching
The key in using either of these tools is in the tagging (Google calls theirs labels but they act just like tags.) We can bookmark hundreds of pages but finding them later is the problem and that’s where tags help. The other important aspect to finding bookmarks is searching. Google naturally provides superior searching of bookmarks compared to del.icio.us. That’s what they try to be best at after all. The main reason I say this is Google indexes everything about the bookmark. So if you do a search it can match anything having to do with the bookmark such as label, title, note etc… del.icio.us on the other hand, only provides searching for tags. This is not bad but it’s not great. It just emphasizes the importance of good tagging when using del.icio.us. If you use a bad tag that doesn’t relate well to the link you might be out of luck.
Why I picked del.icio.us
There are two reasons why del.icio.us has won my vote. The first is that the community can contribute to del.icio.us and help each other. The second is that everything that del.icio.us has at stake is in web based bookmarking/tagging. Google has a several (at least!) projects to worry about.
The community factor helps give del.icio.us a giant boost. You can label bookmarks for friends. This is handy for showing a buddy a page you are interested in without calling him up and forcing him to take a look immediatley. It just shows up in a section called, “links for you” which really means links for you from other people. You can also add your friends entire list of bookmarks to your network. So if they are willing to share you can see all the pages they are interested in. Finally you can run a search for items from the whole del.icio.us community. The relevancy of these searches is through how often pages are bookmarked rather then some other algorithim. It seems to work really well so far. I’m sure I am missing a few other cool collaborative features and it looks like they are working on more.
Google has a lot going on. del.icio.us is built around one product for now. This makes a compelling argument for del.icio.us. For instance there isn’t even a sign of the ability to share bookmarks in Google while del.icio.us is continually improving their own service. That’s all they got to work on and it’s as simple as that. While there may be a team dedicated to Google Bookmark I doubt the company’s success is hinging on that product. Some may argue del.icio.us is owned by Yahoo. But I have yet to see a Yahoo logo on the del.icio.us site. Looks like Yahoo is doing the right thing and letting del.icio.us maintain its autonomy.
Check them both out at:
http://www.google.com/bookmarks/
Also please comment and let me know about anything I’ve missed.