The title of this post was originally going to be “Delicious: A Review from a Late Adopter.” But that was four months ago and only a few days after I started using social bookmarking site Delicious. At the time, I found it useful even if lacking in a few areas.
But it only took a week before I went back to my old bookmarking habits with Firefox. And now I’m more excited about the latest bookmarking features in Firefox 3 (due out later this month) than the next version of Delicious, which is taking its sweet time.
The problem with Delicious (for me, at least) is that it required too much of me as a bookmarking service and didn’t provide me much as a place to find new content. The first problem could be with how I browse the web. I often find myself reading/browsing a dozen or so stories/websites at the same time. For the most part, it’s not a problem to have tons of tabs open in Firefox.
But I often get interrupted in my daily perusing and need to bookmark all the stories I’m half way through or haven’t started reading (the “Bookmark All Tabs” feature in Firefox). Although I’ve found a Firefox plugin that expedites the process of saving sites to Delicious, it’s still one site/story at a time. If I want to save a dozen at a time, I’m obviously going to revert back to Firefox rather than complete twelve separate tasks.
As for using Delicious as a way to discover new content, well, I’ve found it hard to filter out the noise and am generally uninterested in the majority of what the world is bookmarking (apparently).
What about Digg? Even if Delicious came before Digg and is popular in its own right, Digg took the Delicious concept and made it really work as a more social way to find and share new content online. But that was the Digg of what feels like a long time ago (Digg is running on its third major revision while the second version of Digg was arguably the best).
We have covered Digg issues plenty before. The site’s problems are easy to sum up in one sentence: It’s slow, bloated, outdated, gamed, policed, etc. As a result, the front page content is pretty lacking to say the least.
Now on to Reddit. While Reddit has been around for a while, I never took it seriously, always thinking of it as “Digg Light.” But it turns out that it does what Digg does but better and faster. The latest version was released recently and makes it even more accessible to the masses. I could go through all the reasons individually in detail, but I’ll just summarize: fairly interesting content, intuitive interface, and very fast response.
So there you have it. For my needs, I find bookmarking is still best handled by my browser of choice while social news and content discovery is best handled by Reddit. What do you use for bookmarking and content discovery?
Reddit is definitely making strides, and with the rest of the social news websites failing to take over I reckon they’re a major update away from seriously eating Digg’s traffic.
I hate reddit vs the others because of the incredible amount
of duplicate submissions. It seems like it would be a trivial
task to get rid of duplicates, but they don’t seem to care. If
they could bother to fix this, it would be a huge improvement.
Really? True that Reddit has duplicate submissions, but Digg has about 10x more last time I checked. And Digg’s system for dealing with it sucks. Unless Reddit comes up with a clever way to handle dupe checking, I’m glad they don’t do it. I’m fine being my own filter in the name of the website being very fast.