Faves : BlueDot Gets On Topic

I started using BlueDot at the start of the year, after a brief trial of del.icio.us, and I've never had a reason to reconsider my decision. It seems that BlueDot has been less happy with itself than I've been so they've taken a long hard look at themselves and decided to re-brand as Faves.com. They've also introduced an range of new features and interface tweaks so I'd like to spend some time considering these changes.

Firstly, lets start with the name change. For a start it's shorter and easier, but it's also a lot clearer. The idea of a dot was always a bit forced and why was the dot blue anyway. But we've been bookmarking favourites since the day we dicovered the web and how natural it is to shorten favourites to faves. So name change : tick.

The next big change I noticed was voting. Every fave now has a digg style vote box. It's not really a new feature as you always had the option of marking a link as a favourite. But presenting it this way makes it's purpose much clearer. Prior to these changes I only ever marked one link as a favourite and that was as a test. Since the change I've already cast a number of votes.

The other new feature is a Votes tab. This allows you to quickly view faves you've voted on. I'll be interested to see what happens here as my list of voted faves grows. I imagine it could very quickly become unmanageable. What would be nice is the addition of "username's Votes" to the search options at the top of the page. The other useful feature for managing votes would be the addition of the Tag filtering tools available on your Faves tab. This would also highlight patterns in what you are voting for and could lead to the discovery of new Topics (see below).

The most useful new feature for me is the addition of Topics. Topics are a re-vamped version of BlueDot's buzz with some powerful new features. New Faves for your selected Topics appear on your home page and can be ordered by popularity or chronologically. There is also an option to hide Faves you've already seen. Topic selections are managed from the Topics area. Here you can browse Topics, search for Topics, or select from Recommended Topics. This last option seems to work particularly well as it looks at your most common Tags and recommends useful Topics based on these. Once you find a relevant topic you can add it to your selected Topics (or remove if it's already selected). These topic pages can also be added to your RSS reader. Which seems a particularly useful way to stay in touch. My only concern here is that the Topics are seperated from your Faves and I'd like to see these areas integrated in some way. But that is probably a bit impractical.

With this round of changes Faves is probably the most underrated of the available social bookmarking sites. The latest round of stats suggest that this is changing but Faves figures are still well below del.icio.us. I imagine social bookmarking is a fairly conservative marketplace. You hardly want to be moving your bookmarks every other week regardless of how easy the individuals systems make it to move. Therefore growth would need to be tied to a long term plan. But these changes show that Faves definitely has the future in it's sights.

Social Bookmarking : The Urge to Search

Regular readers will probably have noticed that I'm currently a bit obsessed with Social Bookmarking sites. In the recent past I've posted on del.icio.us, BlueDot and Ma.gnolia. Part of the reason for this obsession is that I want all my bookmarks in one place and to have a custom interface to them on geekglue.com (you can still see my old system in the links area). Which brings me to my problem. Working with the BlueDot API (the del.icio.us version) I realised that none of these services offer a bookmark based search facility. You can search by tags but not on the title or content of a bookmark. For example, I currently have 391 bookmarks, 41 tagged as actionscript. I can easily select a second tag to further filter my actionscript bookmarks. But there have been a number of recent occasions when I knew the bookmarks title but was a bit vague on it's tags (partly this is poor tag organisation; what can I say it is a work in progress). What would be great is to be able to search bookmarks rather than tags. For most people it's not really a problem because they maintain a relatively short collection of bookmarks. But as soon as your largest tag group starts to exceed 20 bookmarks (2 pages on BlueDot). Then you'll start looking for a bookmark search button. Being able to select the number of bookmarks displayed per page could help. But really thats just postponing the inevitable primordial urge : the urge to search.

As Mohit points out, see comments, a search method is available through the BlueDot SOAP API. My bad for not following through my research properly. It isn't entirely clear in the documentation but you can search purely using a keyword (i.e with tags = NULL; thanks Mohit for the clarification).

Bookmarking sites : Traffic Compared

I was messing around with Alexa yesterday (after finding Movers) and decided to compare del.icio.us, BlueDot and Ma.gnolia. The first thing that struck me was the magnitude of difference : del.icio.us is way ahead of the others for traffic. This seemed particularly interesting to me because I find BlueDot much more useful than del.icio.us. To quantify that a little I can find more useful links in ten minutes with BlueDot than I could in the same time in del.icio.us. Part of the reason for this is that BlueDot offers an easier to use system with more useful functions. BlueDot also seems to have a more targeted selection of users. Hence I am finding other users dots more relevant for me.

Ma.gnolia is another great looking system. But one reason I've never gotten really interested in it is I haven't found any useful links in Ma.gnolia. It is well designed and easy to use. But the target audience is less interested in web development issues. Hence Ma.gnolia is less useful to me. But I imagine if more people started using Ma.gnolia then it may become more useful than BlueDot. Of course, having more users can quickly point to the limitations of a system. The biggest problem for del.icio.us is success.

For del.icio.us to become more useful it would need to find ways to simplify link finding within it's system. Because the two real factors that will determine the most successful system is the number of useful links for a specific target audience and how efficiently those links can be found.

Would you like images with that bookmark?

Still thinking about thumbnails to go with your online bookmarks (A del.icio.us makeover and Going Dotty). I prefer BlueDot's system that allows you to select a graphic from the page to use with your dot. My Songbird Media Player dot provides an ideal example. But what about pages that don't have a suitable image. Perhaps they don't have any images or the only images are ads. Then it would be great if you could use a screen grab of the page. No doubt this is a bit labor intensive to do on the fly on the off chance that you might want that. But perhaps it could be a distinct process that the user could initiate.

Another option might be that sites could provide a preferred image for use by bookmarking systems, in the same way that they supply a favicon (I guess a 'doticon' is going too far) . This would provide sites an additional opportunity to control their branding. Which is never a bad thing IMHO.

Going Dotty

Having embraced the Web 2.0 memes I was keen to compare BlueDot and del.icio.us. When I first saw BlueDot I suspected it of being a bit lightweight. But at the same time I was getting a bit frustrated with del.icio.us's lack of depth and awkward interface (see 'Getting a taste for del.icio.us'). So last week I resolved to give BlueDot a go (BlueDot : My Dots).

Post registration BlueDot is keen to impress presenting three options for newbies:

add toolbar buttons

The toolbar buttons were easy to install and worked exactly as with del.icio.us.

import from del.icio.us

Import from del.icio.us is a painless process that copies over all your del.icio.us bookmarks and their tags with the option of adding an "imported from del.icio.us" tag. It even offers the option of only imported new bookmarks. Allowing you to continue using del.icio.us and regularly syncronising your dots.

find friends

friends seems a strong word (contacts seems more useful) but essentially it's a mechanism for sharing your dots with specific users. You find someone who you'd like to be friends with and send a friend request. If they accept they will appear in your friends list and their latest links are added to your page. Choosing your friends carefully gives you a great tool for finding relevant sites.

There are a few features that aren't immediately apparent when you import your bookmarks :

• The most useful for me is the ability to select an image for your dot. This is best explained with an example. You've found a page you want to dot. This page contains a number of images. You use your toolbar button to add this dot. A dialog appears with space for some notes and tags. But it also shows an image from the page with the option to select a different image from the page (or no image). The image you select will be displayed when you are browsing your dots. This visual reminder makes it very easy to quickly find a specific dot from your vast collection. My only grumble about images is that you can't change them later. Which means you need to take care selecting an image when adding the dot. It also means that imported bookmarks will never have an image.


• Highlighting text when dotting a page will automatically add that text to your dot as a note. This is very similar to del.icio.us functionality with one exception; BlueDot appends 'quoted :' to the start of the note. It's a simple thing but it quickly distinguishes between your opinions and site hype.


• BlueDot offers the option to rate your dots. This was one thing I really missed in del.icio.us in transitioning from my personal bookmarking system. It's a great feature but it needs to go further. Currently your rating is displayed but not really used. Ideally it would be great if you could filter and order your links based on their rating.

BlueDot is must better designed than del.icio.us. Each dot is given a reasonable amount of room. Edit and delete buttons are easily spotted but not in the way. The rating stars and shared users is a bit cramped. But these are less used features. My one complaint is that the BlueDot banner and the user profile take up too much space of the screen real estate. When you add in the ads you need to scroll quite a bit before reaching the actual dots (which is the sites purpose). I can't help but think that a mini profile on the sidebar with a link to the full profile page would be useful but not intrusive. Ideally I think an option allowing users to choose between the current layout and the sidebar profile would be perfect.

In fact a bit more customisation would be wonderful. There is an option to change the default page background or to select a pattern. But the options are very limited. Reminding me of the worst cell color options for Excel.

Despite a few quibbles I'm essentially sold on using BlueDot. It has all the functionality of del.icio.us plus more with the added bonus that it's easy to find and to use.

Getting a taste for del.icio.us

A few weeks ago I decided to start experimenting with del.icio.us. It's all part of a resolution get come to grips with all the Web 2.0 applications and how they interelate. In the back of my mind is a hope to manage the Links area for Geek Glue using something like del.icio.us rather than maintaining my own backend editor. Ideally all of Geek Glue's content will be stored and managed elsewhere. With the site itself managing how this content is presented. The benefits of this approach is that less server space is required, time can be spent developing the presentation layer without needing to develop editors as well and that I will develop a comprehensive knowledge of available technologies. There are also a good range of risks and I might talk about them at a different time. But for now I want to consider del.icio.us.

First up, the best thing about del.icio.us is how easy it is to add new links. In Firefox you can install an extension that adds two buttons. One takes you to your del.icio.us account and the other opens a form to add the current page to your links. This form lets you add tags (showing suggested, popular and your own tags ), to decide whether you want to share this link and to write a brief description. This requires four less selections than my own Geek Glue editor.

I love del.icio.us's incredibly simple url's. Typing http://del.icio.us/accountName shows all links for that account. Typing http://del.icio.us/accountName/tagName shows you everything that the user has tagged with that tag name. For example, to see all my Flex links you just go to http://del.icio.us/geekglue/flex or to see all shared links for Flex : http://del.icio.us/tag/flex. This is a simple and very effective system.

I like the fact that it tells you how many other users have shared a particular link and that you can view their comments (although I hate how unhelpful most of these comments are). You can follow this further to see what these users are saving. Finding a user with similar interests can lead to a rich mine of useful sites.

What I don't like is that all of my links are displayed chronologically. Which means something I saved a few months ago is many pages deep. I could search for it if I could remember it's name. I could filter by tag. But I already have some tags that are many pages deep. What I'd love is some more sorting options.

The other thing that is missing is the ability to rate my links (and then sort by rating). I understand that part of the idea is that good pages will be linked by more users. But that doesn't help me to find pages that I think are important.

I like bundles; which is a way of organising your tags into groups. But I find the bundle editor awkward to use (and hence I regularly have unbundled tags). I'd also like a lot more options about how tags and bundles are viewed.

Overall del.icio.us is an extremely useful way to manage your bookmarks. The only similar system that I'm aware of is BlueDot which I plan to try out in the near future. Sure there are things that could be better about del.icio.us. But at the same time it offers more functionality than I'd have time to devlop for myself.

technorati tags:Bookmarks, del.icio.us, BlueDot

Torn Tween the Fox and the Flock

In my last post I was singing the praises of Flock. But here I am the morning after and my new love looks less pretty in the cold light of day. I guess you'd say that we had a falling out. To be specific a disagreement over managing bookmarks. I found myself looking back with fondness to Firefox's flexibility with nested bookmark folders. The delightful way she allowed me to define keywords that could be used as shortcuts to a page. But Flock would have none of this and I found myself with a long list of folders (many of them now empty because each folders children were now it's siblings ; unwanted perversion be gone from my sight). So that was it. I found my mouse straying to the quickLaunch bar where my lost love awaited patient and forgiving. But not before I had a word or two to say through the Flock feedback form. Flock was quick to reply. She claims that nested folders will be possible before she makes here version 1 debut. I was somewhat soothed and have promised to visit and make use of her again. She has such a lovely way with photos and she offers such a comfortable space to read the news. Should I feel guilt for spreading my love between the Fox and the Flock?

technorati tags:internet, browser, Flock, Firefox