28 delicious alternatives to Delicious

Well, we've all seen the news that the single most insane idea of the year award can go to Yahoo who are apparently going to be closing Delicious. Quite why they're not prepared to ask people to pay for access, or even to offer it to someone like the Library of Congress to take over defeats me, but clearly straightforward thinking isn't their forte else they wouldn't be taking this stupid step in the first place. So, if you want to choose a different bookmarking resource, what options are available to you? The good news is that there's quite a lot.

A1 Webmarks. I don't personally like the look and feel of this service, but that might just be me.

Bibsonomy does what you'd expect from a social bookmarking service. It has an RSS option, tagging, share bookmarks and see what others have saved.

Blinklist is nice looking, but you can't import stuff, so is of limited value to refugees.

Bookmarks2 is a 'simple and not social bookmarking service' according to the site. Save a link with a mouse click, access from any computer, register for free, tag bookmarks, but it doesn't look like you can share what you've found.

Brainify is academic social bookmarking and networking for college and university students. The emphasis is on academia, so is probably of little use for many of us, but if you're in that area, take a quick look.

Buddymarks stores your bookmarks online, imports current bookmarks, easily add new ones, share them, use tags and categories.

Connotea has been around for a very long time now and is designed for the academic community. I'd be inclined to use this over Brainify if I was an academic.

Diigo If you're going to be going anywhere, it's probably here. It's got a good reputation, took over FURL, allows you to save tweeted links, has a groups feature, works with smartphones, lets you highlight parts of pages, sends you emails to see what your groups are up to. It's the obvious post Delicious choice for most.

Evernote is a general cut, paste and save tool, and you may already use it. If you do, consider it as an option to Delicious

Faves seems reasonably complete. Save your bookmarks with the toolbar, follow groups of people and topics, let others follow you.

Favilous has reasonable functionality - you can choose your own categories, see what pages are being bookmarked, use a bookmarklet, see who has bookmarked pages and when, see how popular a bookmark is, follow specific people, tweets the link to your twitter account, and creating pending bookmarks. It's also free. If you're looking for a slightly off the wall alternative to Delicious this would be a good bet.

Google Bookmarks. If you've got a Google account you've probably used this without realising it. Just click on the link and see. But - do you want to give Google even more power over your life than it already has?

Historio.us is free for 300 sites and about $20 per year after that. That will probably turn a lot of people off, but it's got some good functionality, so take a quick look before instantly turning it down.

Lincut is very basic, supports most browsers except IE (doh!), has a bookmarklet, but no RSS feeds or easy sharing option. I'm not encouraged by the poorly worded content and I wouldn't personally consider using it.

Linkagogo is another social bookmarking product. It is quite feature rich - syncs with the browser, has a turbo mode, reminds you of bookmarks it's time to visit again, lets you create folders, import/export, verify if bookmarks are still valid, de-dupes and so on. It's a really nice looking tool.

Mr Wong has over 7 million monthly users. Make bookmarks publically available or keep them private. Search for subjects on tags. It's designed as a social bookmarking system and it's free.

Mybookmarks is a resource that I've used myself. Import bookmarks, export them, make them public, but poor on help and FAQ material. It has however been around for a long time.

Netvibes isn't a bookmarking resource, but you can make it into one. It has a very useful bookmark option that allows you to import bookmarks, and you can tag them and make them quickly available. If you're using the public pages you can also let other people see them. It's not one click addition though, and does need a bit of cut and paste. However, if you're into home/start pages, it might be worth while considering moving everything across to Netvibes.

Oneview calls itself a social bookmarking resource but is currently 'unavailable for a few minutes', and this is so not the time to be unavailable we can give this one a miss as well.

Online Favourites is a basic service which allows you to store your bookmarks online and access from anywhere. If you're not after much, this may well be all that you need.

Pinboard is a paid option, costing more depending how many users it has. Currently it costs just over $8 but this will increase I'm sure. There is a good 'buzz' about it so it's worth poking around in.

Skloog is primarily a basic home/start page option, but you can add bookmarks to different sites and create different tabs. It's not close to a direct replacement to Delicious, but if you've only got a few bookmarks (limit is 2,000), and you're not bothered about sharing them, this would work.

Startaid does what you expect by now. Share favourites with friends, post comments about sites.

Squidoo allows you to create pages of content, with appropriate subsections and using their bookmarklet tool add content in as you need to. I like this and use it myself. You can see any example with my Twitter for librarians page. You can share content and have an RSS feed set up. It's more of a published page to which you add your own content, but it's an interesting alternative.

Wozaik is 'the new generation of bookmarks' and allows you to cut portions of websites to visualise them all in the same space. It does have a bookmarklet that you can use, but I can't see any way of sharing bookmarks or creating RSS feeds.

XMarks used to be called Foxmarks and until recently was slated for closure, but has been saved. You load it into your browser, and it cross syncs for you. I find it great for keeping bookmarks synced across machines, browsers and laptops. It's not a Delicious tool though as it's not cloud based.

Zootool is getting good coverage but they've been badly hit by the Delicious news and are currently offline, which is very unfortunate for them. I've not played around with it myself, so can't give much of an opinion. The emphasis however is apparently on saving visual content.

If you want more options, try the social bookmark option at Delicious to see what other people have saved. Ironic and rather sad, but useful. For even more, there's a listing of 115 social news and bookmark sites that have been reviewed at Social Media Trader, but this is a list that's 3 years old, so you'll find a few of them don't work any more.

How do you save your existing Delicious bookmarks? It's actually very easy, but rather than explain it myself, Lifehacker has done an excellent job, so I'll point you to 'How to export your bookmarks and import them into your favourite browser'.

So, in summary, where do you go from here? It's an idea to back up what you've got. It's also worth crossing your fingers and hoping that someone takes the service over, but it's got to be tempting for someone to do this. However, look at what else you're using. If you use Netvibes, Evernote, or Diigo, just transfer everything across. If you're keen on the social aspect, choose one of those tools. If you're not bothered, any of the above will probably do it for you - just find one that you like. If pushed to point you in one direction though, it would be Diigo.

Edited to add: Well, it would appear now that Delicious isn't part of Yahoo's burnt earth plans and they're looking to offload it somewhere. They're currently whining on about how the press caused problems when all of the problems were of their own making. Danny Sullivan has written a great piece that totally destroys the Yahoo Monkeys in charge. It's worth reading if for no other reason than to show that even companies you might expect to work well with social media are painfully clueless and inept.

Comments

[Christine]

Thanks for the great list. I've also been looking at Licorize and Wonderpage. But I'm still hoping Yahoo! will have a change of heart! :(

[Mike]

Re. Favilous. Just a note to say that we are currently improving the site with visual improvements and additional functionality including tagging and the ability to import bookmarks (from delicious for example) plus a host of new functionality in early 2011.

[walt crawford]

A first-rate service to the community of about-to-be-refugees, even if your initial comment on Yahoo!'s decision may be a bit too kind. Thanks! (Sigh: But now I want to tag this page for reference...using Delicious, of course, since the icon's right there on my address bar. I'll learn.)

[Competia]

Any suggestions for tools where bookmarks can be exported with comments to a nice and simple format i.e. pdf ?

[Phil Bradley]

Competia - I'd suggest export to HTML and then use an HTML-PDF conversion utility. Try my Web 2 (I want to) weblog under Misc File Formats for a few tools that should achieve that for you. :)

[Cristina Mariani]

How about Stumble Upon?

[Andy Tattersall]

Thanks Phil, ever on the ball - hopefully Delicious won't go, purely as we need useful tools to survive. If not, what future holds for the smaller sites and tools. Considering that the majority of computer users don't use anything in the realms of Delicious, we're yet to reach the golden age of social sofwtare (in my humble opinion)

[Hugh Jorgan]

Your review of Google Bookmarks is a joke. Why even mention it if you fail to review it? It happens to save, tag and categorize bookmarks very well.

[Pietro Polsinelli]

Licorize does import from Delicious (preserving tags), and is built on a different philosophy from traditional bookmarking services: the bookmark is expandable as a "seed" for ideas, projects and so on. If you bookmark for work - and not exclusively for fun - it coud be useful.

[Daniel]

I like Netvouz.com, it has been around for years and I really like its simple interface.

[Andy Tattersall]

Latest update from Delicious, promising news, but like Pageflakes damage has been done, how much though?
http://blog.delicious.com/index.htm

[Brian O'Doherty]

Another alternative is Netsso.com. You can export your Delicious links to your desktop and then click to import into www.Netsso.com But Netsso is not for "social bookmarking"..Instead it delivers your links privately to you on any PC, in a unqiue "desktop-like" interface, which enables you to drag the links and group them as most suits your current priorities, etc. Name your link as you wish, with any memorable title...Netsso will remember it and dial you in, including url, username and password.

[Rene Verkaart]

I use www.vizited.com. I love the design of the website. It does exactly what it promisses: your bookmarks made izi! Bookmarks are saved as thumbnails, you can tag and search and even share it with your friends.
It's still in beta, but the makers listen very carefully to wishes and feedback from users. So send in you wishes and find them implemented in the next update.
Check it out. I can recommend it.

[Guillaume Decugis]

I've found using Instapaper works really well for me (I have the iPad and iPhone App in premium versions which are not very expensive). I can archive and classify articles and I have them synched offline to read in the plane.

And for anything worth sharing or publishing on topics that I care about, I use Scoop.it the new publishing-by-curation platform we've just created here at Goojet (Invites to private beta available for those interested in trying : guillaume at goojet . com).

[Arnaud CM]

Hi Phil, sorry but Pearltrees is missing !

www.pearltrees.com

Very nice alternative, i use it everyday. Simple, Firefox/Chrome plugin available, and a community growing up.

Arnaud

[Truong Phan]

for who use Instapaper, I write a tiny app to import from delicious dangtruong.appspot.com/bookmarks

[Gwyneth Marshman]

We currently use Delicious to manage the 'Useful Links' section of our website, and even though Delicious may not be going down imminently we think it would be wise to locate an alternative. However, I'm not sure that the concept of 'Useful Links' is really helpful any more, so I'm not sure whether to look for a simple bookmark listing service or something more complex.

As a longer-term project I'm looking at the whole structure of our website and how we can better organise it to link in to other relevant resources on the web. However, this is not going to be a quick job and I'm concerned I'll end up spending so much time evaluating the possibilities offered by other resources that I'll miss the 'quick win'!

Any suggestions for where to start? I have Netvibes at the back of my mind as something I'd like to do things with at some point... does it have the flexibility to evolve from a bookmarking service into something more complex later on if desired? (Only problem is I work for the NHS and many people still use IE6, which I think is an issue in terms of speed?)