Web::Social Bookmarking

Here is a list of websites that has something to do with 'social bookmarking' or 'search based on human indexing'.

• del.icio.us
• digg
• wink
• furl
• spurl
• blinklist
• del.irio.us
• feedme links
• linkroll
• netvouz
• scuttle
• snap
• clusty
• blingo
• rojo
• simpy

... and here is a great resource for understanding the players.

Now, I can surely see the value of this approach -- automatic indexing based on links and keywords is very limiting and it is believable that human-indexing can improve the search results.

However, at the same time, here are the problems:

• There are too many pages on the web. Human indexing can cover only a miniscule portion of the available web pages
• People who understand and willing to contribute to the index (by bookmarking and sharing them) are the long-tail, geeks.
• As a result, this approach only seems to work with subjects that would be interesting to techies and geeks.
• It's hard to expect people to just sit and bookmark random, generic web pages, and newer, more interesting pages tend to get bookmarked.

So, as a result, digg is one of the most popular, successful sites. I'd like to see a website with a business model that can attract my mother to use and bookmark all the pages she knows. Now, that's what google should be worried about.