I have tried out as many different social bookmark services as I could find over the past few weeks. Mainly just to experiment; I don’t have any significant complaints about del.icio.us. I just want to see what else is out there. I want to see where del.icio.us fits into the spectrum of social bookmarks.
Other services have nicer graphics, more useful value-add features, del.icio.us import/export/management services, better bookmarklets (though not better FF extension), easier tagging… I could probably do a matrix of some of these features, but I won’t take the time now.
Anyway, I am still with del.icio.us after all this experimentation. Nothing tempted me to permanently convert, and I’ll stick with del.icio.us mainly because my network is on del.icio.us. It’s not even the best site for social bookmark networks (with respect to raw features), but the people I want to send links to are all on del.icio.us and they’re not on other services. Until that changes, del.icio.us will continue to house my bookmarks. The network effects have me locked in.
I found del.icio.us was the most “open” of a collection of social bookmarking services, it has well documented APIs and provides access to much of the data a user has saved. Other services are more “write only” and don’t make it easy to pull out the data for reuse. My notes are here: http://artific.com/202/2006/10/social-bookmarking-and-attention/