I Fell from the Moon

Or maybe you're wondering what the heck I'm talking about. Social bookmarking is the action of sharing links to websites to others through a web service. Examples include Facebook, Digg, StumbleUpon, del.icio.us.

So am I a social bookmarking addict? Maybe. It might say something about me that I use more than one service. As my main service, I use spurl.net. Spurl.net is the most complete online bookmarking service I've seen. It completely replaces any locally running bookmarking system. With instant bookmark search, categories and tags. But there's a catch. Importing your bookmarks might not work. And it's currently in a limited feature set. It seems like it's abandoned by the creators. Because of that I'm using Simpy as a backup bookmarking system if Spurl ever dies.

While Spurl definitely does have some social bookmarking features for sharing, I find friend based systems to be more enjoyable when sharing links. Therefore I'm using Digg and StumbleUpon. Digg.com is a site for sharing links to technology news, and related things that geeks like me enjoy, such as videos. But since Digg.com is mostly technology related, I'm using more mainstream social bookmarking services such as StumbleUpon. StumbleUpon was originally a social bookmarking community based around a Firefox extension. But later they added a Internet Explorer add-on and several people are working on various tools for other browsers such as Opera. There are already bookmarklets available, widgets (including one from a team I've been working with). There are even some Opera add-ons that I don't trust.

Facebook is another alternative if you want to share links with your friends. Facebook is a very popular online community where you can find your friends and socialize with them. Facebook allows you to share links to videos and sites with your friends.

Well. With all these services, it might be hard to keep track of all the ways you can bookmark sites. But people have been trying to do something with the problem. One of these sites are AddThis.com. Sadly, they've done overkill by using extensions instead of more simple browser modifications. But fear not. I bring you the AddThis social bookmarking button for Opera. Just drag it to your toolbar of choice to start sharing links with your friends.

Add This!

For those of you that are using another browser, you can't add this button to any of your toolbars. But that doesn't mean you can't use AddThis. Their JavaScript based site buttons aren't only useful on sites. They work as bookmarklets too. Simply visit AddThis.com and drag The button that says Bookmark to your bookmarks toolbar.

Good luck and have fun playing with social bookmarking!