Is Social Bookmarking Dead?

[Harold Mansfield]

A link that I posted on another thread
Tech's Biggest Win, Flop and Surprise of 2010 (http://mashable.com/2010/12/28/tech-win-flop-surprise-2010/),
spoke of the fall of Digg's popularity in recent months, mainly due to the upsurge in use of Social Networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.

Not to be confused with Social Networking, Social Bookmarking is when you create a profile on a 3rd party site like Digg, Mixx, Stumble, Fark, and others as a way of sharing interesting, or informative links to places and articles that you like around the web.

As mentioned in the article, Digg was once the information and link sharing king of the web...just last year. Now, even I don't use sites like it as much as I used to, opting now to share that information on Facebook and Twitter.

Outside of a source for links, I can't really say that they still hold much interest for me at all.

What do you guys think? Do you still use bookmarking sites like Digg, or has the love come and gone for more dynamic sharing and interaction options such as Facebook?

[vangogh]

I don't think of sites like Digg as social bookmarking. I think of them as social voting sites. To me a social bookmarking site is Delicious, which is something I still use and use often.

Social voting sites I think are dying. I never really made use of them even at their high point, because they always seemed kind of pointless to me. In a very short amount of time social voting sites seem filled with spam and even for the non-spam posts the popular ones are usually dominated by a few powerful submitters and a few of the same old sites.

Having said that some social voting sites seem to still be doing well. Reddit for example looks like it continues to grow. There are also some niche social voting sites that do manage to coral the spam and are better about posts from a wider variety of members and sites becoming popular. In general I think these sites will eventually go away. Most aren't great sources for finding good content and most posts tend to get voted on based on the person posting as opposed to the content being posted.

One seo social voting site, Sphinn, dropped the voting aspect completely not too long ago. I think they saw the writing on the wall.

[KristineS]

I've never been a huge fan of any of those sites and don't tend to use them. I go more to Twitter and/or Facebook when I want to share something.

[Steve B]

I've never heard of it or any of those sites.

[vangogh]

Short article on The Fall of Digg (http://woorkup.com/2010/12/29/the-fall-of-digg/).

Basically it suggests the reasons for Digg's downfall can be seen in a sentence on the Digg describing itself.


Digg is a place for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the web

People are currently doing both on Twitter and Facebook and have no need for Digg. Twitter is faster and Facebook is more personal. I still think the whole voting thing drives all but some early adopters who are collecting the votes away. Most voting sites I've seen tend to become an impenetrable clique of power users and everyone else.

[Harold Mansfield]

I've never heard of it or any of those sites.

I don't know whether to be shocked or happy for you. I could have used a few less things in my head the last 2 years. Sometimes the web can be complete overload of things that may or may not be significant 6 months down the line.

[greenoak]

neat article....im suprised to see im involved in the 2 biggest things.... the ipad....i love mine!! and facebook, lots of fans, we are looking at year end charts and numbers today and crediting facebook for some of our good things...maybe things are getting easier and more used...
i doubt if many of my customers use any of that other stuff.like digg...i think i would have heard about it from them if it was a factor....for social they are on facebook...and they love their phones and aps ...
i also like something new that i havnt learned the name of yet....but a lot of places know what i like..and use it to help me filter out thngs.......like a movie or an app or a shirt or a shoe... or a book...

[jamesray50]

Is digg where you vote and there is a thumbs up or thumbs down? I think I have done that a few times, but not sure why I did it. Just to be doing it I suppose. If I thought it would help my blogs or website I would put those on there.

[Harold Mansfield]

Well, that's the idea. Readers would share and link to your articles via their profiles on the various bookmarking sites. It is good for backlinks, but I honestly never really got into using any of those sites. I just never found it very productive browsing other peoples favorite links. Especially to articles since information is so consumable and changes so quickly.
I think Facebook got the whole information sharing thing right, especially with the option to follow business pages and get all of your info from various sources when it is fresh.

The amount of social bookmarking sites is huge with Digg as the leader and most popular.
If their usage stats are taking a dive, I can only imagine what the others must look like.

[vangogh]

It looks like Digg's loss has been Reddit's gain (http://mashable.com/2011/01/03/reddit-2010-growth/). Reddit grew 230% last year. The main difference between the two sites seems to be Reddit has a great community, where Digg pushed the voting and never really had the greatest community. Even at the height of its popularity I stayed away from Digg for the most part, because the community seemed so obnoxious.