It seemed that social bookmarking sprung up almost overnight, spread like wildfire, and then proceeded to burn out almost as fast. Part of the reason for social bookmarking’s rapid growth was it’s use by bloggers to share their latest posts and get their blogs out to a wider audience, but what’s led to it’s equally rapid demise?
Organizing the web is not simple, just ask Google, and while there are plenty of ways to organize and index information the most popular amongst social sites are tags. Social sites like to use them because they’re incredibly easy to implement and search, and even with clustering algorithms tag implementation is still fairly simple and cheap. The users like them because they can choose whatever keywords, or phrases they deem important. Adding tags, which are basically descriptors, to content seems like the ideal way to explain what it’s about and let users know if they’d be interested in the content. The problem with letting users tag items with whatever they want is that there will always be a population interested in gaming the system. These users have, unfortunately, contributed to the spamming and abuse of the social bookmarking system resulting in the exodus of many former users.
The other way that most social networks organize their content is through some kind of voting system. The peer voting system does keep some spammers at bay, but only the lazy ones. All it takes is a few forum posts, or some cheap labor to game the voting system.
The reason people generally prefer to use sites like Google and Wikipedia (which admittedly have their own problems) is that there is some supervision and quality control in effect. Whereas most the bookmark sites are a free for all, and even if some of them did clean up the users have already moved on to the next big thing. Frankly I like the idea of social bookmarks (i love StumbleUpon!) but they’re going to have to evolve in order to survive the spammers.
