The social bookmarking buzz of late has increased with the volume of Google boycotting chatter. Part of the older, explicit justification for some of the social apps is that Google returns irrelevant results; the newer, implied argument is that Google might return “all only the sites fit to list,” making Google not the Grey Lady, but your kindergarten teacher who was into primary-colored clothing and ordering the lesson by her private wisdom.

The rally blogcalls to boycott have a kind of Marxist, we-webgeeks-have-only-got-each-other tone; if that’s true, why not focus our considerable energy on social bookmarking apps? There are enough in private and public beta to warrant tools to organize the applications themselves. While I previously had 5 buttons in my bookmark toolbar, one bookmarklet (a little javascript to let the user post to that application) for each of the social apps I’m trying, I now have one button, a Bookmarklet of Champions. Blummy, which collates all the bookmarklet posting buttons into one “blummy” button, has a nice interface for creating custom bookmarklets as well as bookmarklets that aren’t in the Blummy archive yet; it took me less than a minute to make a blummlet for Ma.gnolia this morning (thanks Captain Alexander Kirk).

Maggie Tsai, who commented on my last post, has introduced me to Diigo, a bookmarking app with social annotation (SA) capabilities in private beta; the company copy invites you to “think of a giant transparency overlaying on top of all the web pages. You can write on the transparency as you wish, as private notes or public comments.”

So I did. I thought of Lokesh Dhakar’s Lightbox.js script which, in its original form, overlays a pop-up window with an alpha background using javascript and css, and now as Chris Campbell’s Lightbox-Gone-Wild script can pop-up other file types besides images. Lightbox is a javascript way to do something that award-winning full-Flash sites have been doing for a while(e.g. Born Magazine): comfort users by inserting a translucent layer between the original window and the new pop-up window. This depth, promoted conceptually in Tsai’s comment, but not implemented in the interface seems key to differentiating Diigo’s SA from other SA projects like StumbleUpon and Matthew Wilson’s Annozilla, and one reason that the W3C’s Annotea Project, begun in 2001, hasn’t become the “superset” of social apps as Diigo claims.

I see how SA could be used in commercial projects—it reminds me of 37Signals’s Writeboards (in this case, a web page is the collaborative document), and I might make a note or highlight text for my own research, but why would I want to read comments others have made on the page? StumbleUpon enables user comments on pages like Diigo, and the comments I’ve read in both are less than useful. If I have found a new page from a social bookmarking app, I already know it’s interesting and I’ve read the description before clicking the link; if I want to find other sites that a fellow Stumbler likes (or has Dugg), I’ll explore their profile. I don’t need to read comments on top of pages; I’ll scroll down if I want that and respect those commenters for sharing with everyone, and not just the community within the SA app I’m using when I find the page. I don’t feel the need to rate pages either, but ratings, like tag clouds, are de rigueur in the social bookmarking interface.

StumbleUpon’s rating buttons ( “I like It!” with a thumbs up icon and “Not-for-me” button with a thumbs down icon) may be a little Roman for my taste, but the buttons are far less annoying than the fact that I must have the Diigo or StumbleUpon toolbar visible to use the SA tools at all. I can’t lump either app into the “blummy” button as they require multiple buttons, which makes them socially awkward; as Todd Sieling pointed out in his Ma.gnolia comment before, social apps earning gold stars will figure out how to play well with others.

Related posts:

1. Found is the new Search
2. watery gin in the city of cognitive surplus
3. for your consideration: a few things about social content

1. cbd:
   February 7th, 2006 at 8:58 pm

   Thanks for this and your previous post. Some very interesting stuff going on here. Now I need a social password manager :)

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Posted Tuesday, February 7th, 2006, 12:49 pm * Filed in Design. * . Follow responses through the RSS 2.0 feed. Leave a response, or trackback from your own site.