Social Bookmarking

Social Bookmarking utilities have been popping up all over the place, and I found one tool that seems to be pretty complete. It definitely opened my eyes up to some of the lesser known social bookmarking sites that are out there.

I'm really of two mindsets regarding these kind of utilities. For one, I think it's just a bozo move on the part of webmasters to include a link to del.icio.us, digg, furl, and blogger on every one of their pages, sometimes multiple times. I mean, how many visitors are actually going to bookmark you in multiple locations and then digg your article and blog about it? Even your mom won't do all that for you.

On the other hand, one good digg can boost your traffic significantly, so why not give people a chance?

The tool i found is called Socializer. I wasn't searching for it, just noticed it on a page I happened to visit. It provides links to 41 different social bookmarking sites for you. Again, I see this as a little overboard - especially since you have to click each one individually - but at least you are only putting one link up on each page instead of 41.

The down side? Two clicks to do anything that would benefit your site.

The ideal tool in my mind would:

1. Appear via javascript - no sense in providing furl any more direct links - especially to pages that warrant no SE visibility in the first place.


2. Provide direct links - Two clicks to anything is a little much. You can't expect your users to actually click two times for you.


3. Push out the info directly - This doesn't work for all services, but you would get more combo-linking from your visitors if they didn't have to edit your link on their delicious page and then their furl page and then their linkagogo page, etc.
   

It could be pretty easily done for a lot of services, I don't know why nobody has built anything yet. At the very least let people open up a couple of new tabs - I'd be willing to provide multiple social bookmark links to most of my friends if it was easier to do. I'm sure a few other webmasters out there feel the same way.