Bookmark managers are useless (delicious, furl, blinklist…)

Bookmarking services have been growing very fast in the last few months on the Internet. You can of course use your web browser but you won’t have access to them everytime you use a computer that is not yours. That’s why this feature has never really take off even though it exists since almost the beginning of the Internet.

Knowing that issue, many services have grown on the Internet to provide remote access to your bookmarks from anywhere if you have Internet access. You can use delicious, blinklist, furl and now google, yahoo, etc. You can mange your bookmarks and even more interesting share them with the world as these services have built social networks around the bookmarks.

I have subscribed to delicious RSS feed but I don’t use delicious for bookmarking but rather to find interesting pages. I only check the hot list. I tried to use delicious to bookmark interesting websites but it is really not useful for me.

You might have also probably noticed that they for the most part point to great articles. But these are usually articles. So it is something you read only once, like a newspaper so why the hell people save these pages in their delicious bookmark list ?

Perhaps they want other people to see the good article they’ve found. So the action of bookmarking is done to show that you know good places on the web but not to record a link that will click again a few days later. It is mainly for sharing information with others. One other theory is that bookmarking is only used to create a buzz on a website or blog.

It could also be to tell delicious what you like and read in the hope that it proposes you good links that your will like.

But for me it is completely useless to bookmark visited websites.

If I want to go on a website that I appreciate, I just type in the domain name in the address bar of my Firefox browser. Or even better I type the keywords that I’m pretty sure will get me to the wanted page as Google will be used by Firefox to redirect me. Also I think the main part of the Internet users just click on on recorded link from browser history in the drop down list of the address bar.

If I use a bookmark manager like delicious, that suppose I load the delicious page (the domain address is quite hard to type) and then If I’m not logged in I have to type in my name and password, then I should go to my bookmarks and finally I should search for the bookmark I want using the tags maybe… So that’s hard work considering the way now users consume the Internet….. very fast.

Also RSS readers have completely change the way you access information in the way that you don’t need to visit the websites you like to check for interesting information. So you just need to use a RSS reader application to stay tuned with you favorite links.

I wonder if I’m alone in that position. Perhaps I’m not a “standard” Internet user or maybe I’m getting old and social networking is not for me…

Finally I can’t help but saying that the new web 2.0 applications are really geek oriented as delicious top list is always full of articles about linux, web 2.0, web design, css tips, javascript and so on… (see one of my past articles). Why don’t we see articles about life, philosophy, politics, way of life, arts or books ?