Exercise 5 - Social Bookmarking

I have to admit that I'm not really a huge fan of delicious. While I love the idea of social bookmarking, delicious just doesn't do anything special for me. I was really hoping this exercise would change my opinion of the site, but alas I'm afraid it has only made me less likely to use it much after this class. So what is it that I dislike so much about delicious? 


Well, the biggest problem I have is the user interface. To me it seems very non intuitive and quite a lot like I've transported in time back to the 1990s. While a site that hosts a bunch of links isn't and shouldn't be too complicated, delicious feels boring. For me of the biggest advantages of social bookmarking and folksonomies is that they encourage browsing and discovery of new resources. Farkas explains, “people who are looking for the best articles, or for all articles, on a specific subject will have a difficult time finding them in a folksonomy” (137). If I'm interested in finding specific and all inclusive information about a particular topic I don't go to a social bookmarking site. However, if I want to browse around to find awesome cupcake recipes then social bookmarking is where it's at... but still not with delicious. 


Through this exercise I did find some related articles to what we've been researching in class, but nothing more exciting than what a quick Google search using the same tag keywords could have provided. Going through the exercise steps delicious felt cumbersome and hard to navigate through. To me delicious lacks what StumbleUpon (SU) provides, discovery. Not only can I bookmark sites that I find interesting, add tags, and descriptions of those sites, I can also stumble or randomly find sites of interest to me. This can be done by searching all users on SU or just one person. I can search the favorites of people, I can follow them, they can follow me, and best of all the user interface is simple and encourages searching. Links can be displayed based on their format (video, photos,  etc.), show the sites that myself and another stumbler like, what reviews have been made, or what tags a person has added. 


Take a look at the two site screen shots below. They show what my favorites (or bookmarks) page looks like on SU and delicious. You can see the differences in the user interfaces are  pretty striking. There are big photos next to each of the links in SU and many more browsing options.  I highly encourage you to check out StumbleUpon if you haven't already. Get the plug-in for your browser and then set aside an hour of your time to play around. You can have all the features that delicious provides plus a bunch more. What do you think, do you have a social bookmarking preference?