Ditching Google Bookmarks and moving to..

I finally had to ditch Google Bookmarks because of its deficiencies (which I will explain below). The only regret is that I am moving my bookmarks outside the Google ecosystem. Maybe, if I keep using Google Bookmarks for quite some time, it might improve and there might be better integration of Google Bookmarks with their other services which would make my life easier.

What I mean by advantages of Google ecosystem and its integration is that, say for example, I can create a document in Google Docs and later on I can post that as a blog into my blogger account (I might have given a bad example.. if you have a better example, please let me know). So, it lets me move my information and thoughts across different web applications with ease. All my information is consolidated. That's what I mean by "Google ecosystem and its integration advantages".

I might still be updating or taking copies of bookmarks in Google Bookmarks for the above mentioned reasons. But it depends on my time.

Now, I don't blame Google for its deficiencies in Google Bookmark because they never claimed that it was a social bookmarking site. In fact, its a pretty decent personal bookmarking web service. Its just that I am need of some advanced features which are available only in some good social bookmarking sites. Let me just list out as to what kind of features will take it from "good to great" bookmarking service.

Sharing of bookmark: This is one of the main reasons why I want to move out. When Google has been great at exposing information in the form of RSS feeds in most of their web service (for example, feeds from blogger or shared items in Google Reader), I could not understand why they could not do so for such a simple but yet powerful web service.

Private and Public bookmarks: Of course, I can ask for this feature only if the first one is implemented. I would like to share some bookmarks and hide some of them.

Integration with Social Networking sites: This is an era of social networking and if you are an average user, I can bet that you must be having an account in at least one of the following: Orkut; Facebook; MySpace. Most of the other web applications provide ways to share their application in these kind of social networking sites. For example, I can put my twitter profile in Facebook. So, it would be great if I can share my bookmarks in such social networking sites.

Grouping Tags: Its good that I can tag my bookmarks. But it would be great if I can group them into categories or folders. When I could do this in Google Reader then why not in Google Bookmarks.

Blog Integration: Allowing me to add link and/or tag roll widgets into my blog is missing in Google Bookmarks.

Basically, I am asking Google Bookmarks to mature from a personal bookmarking site into a social bookmarking site.

I know Google has been working towards an other web service called Google Share Stuff which is an effort at bringing in the concept social bookmarking. But it is still in its infant stages and has a long way to go before it matures (out of the Google Labs as well.. talking of Google Labs and their beta applications, I am not if Google Bookmarks has graduated out of Google Labs.. I am assuming it did).

Now, I went out hunting for a good bookmarking site. Not many useful reviews or comparisons were available (at least I could not find them). But I did get some pointers on which were the most famous one. And after quick look at each of these services and considering their usability and look'n'feel, I decided to go with Del.icio.us.

Del.icio.us deserves a separate post for itself where I would like to explain its features and advantages. But for now, to tell you in short, its a great web service.

Ever wondered how Techmeme works ?

Well, I always used to wonder about the relevance of technology news that Techmeme aggregates. I was confident that I could google and find out how it actually works.

I had all the time today (in fact I explored the Techmeme page completly to find Techmeme River about which I have explained in my previous post). So I thought let me first google my query about "Techmeme". Well.. no relavant web pages to explain how techmeme works. I told myself that I had to give a better query and so I tried "Techmeme Internals". No luck this time as well. But hey wait.. what a stupid query was that. I am not searching for some operating system internals (But I was hoping that the algorithm behind Techmeme should be something as complex as an OS). Never mind and now I searched for "About Techmeme". Nope.. No luck. And finally I knew where I could find more information about Techmeme's working and so I searched Wikipedia for Techmeme. I did find a link I guess... but the page was empty. To my surprise and dismay I could not find any relevant web page that explained how exactly Techmeme works.

Now, my quest to find more about Techmeme became personal (it was hurting my ego and my ability to find anything on the web is being questioned) and so this time I din't want to trust Google's ability to give me search results by reading my mind and by interpreting one or two words that I typed. So this time I typed in a better query- "How Techmeme work" and this time I found an interview in wired.com of Gabe Rivera who is supposedly the inventor of Techmeme giving some details about how Techmeme works.

Gabe Rivera was very cautious about leaking out any information about how Techmeme works. The only information (or rather confirmation) that he told was that the list of sites it monitors is generated automatically. But never told how it is done.

Somewhere in this interview, Wired News was referring to Rivera's blog site for one of the questions and Ahaa.. so let me check his blog. But wait.. where is this blog. No problem.. I instantly turned towards our universal knowledge base - you guessed it right - Google and searched for "Gabe Rivera" and the first result was http://blog.memeorandum.com/. Clicking this actually redirected me to http://news.techmeme.com/. This site is supposed to be the official news/blog site updating us about what's happening at Techmeme.

As I scrolled down the blog/news about Techmeme, I got my answer to how Techmeme works in this message that was posted yesterday (Oct 1, 2007). This message/news was posted as if in anticipation of my curiosity about how Techmeme works. One day earlier and I still wouldn't have known exactly how Techmeme works.

This is an interesting post and is must-read for anyone curious to know about how Techmeme works. To tell you in short as to what this post says, Techmeme has released a web page called Techmeme Letterboard which actually gives the list of Top 100 sources from which Techmeme picks its news. And these sources are sorted with top-ranked sites on the top. Rivera says that the ranking is based on the presence of this web site. What it essentially means is that the number of external links to one particular web site would increase its presence and in turn its ranking in Techmeme.

Gabe Rivera also explains that he has released this list of sources now (after all these years) is because he was in a comfortable state to tackle any criticism that might arise about the method used to pick up these sources for news and information.

This list is going to be updated quite frequently (on a daily or hourly basis) and Gabe encourages people to use it as they wish.

Great.. I know to some extent as to how exactly this site works. And at least I know the list of sources from which the news and information is getting picked up.

Now thinking about how Techmeme picks most of the popular sources for information, would it be possible for users to build something like their personal Techmeme where she/he adds his source of information and chooses how to present this information to the rest of the world. Its a matter of time before this becomes a reality especially with services like Google Reader where you can share topics of your interest and with Google Shared Stuff.