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Recently I decided to abandon traditional browser based bookmarks (favorites for you IE users) and delve into the world of online bookmarking. One of the big pushes for me to venture into the world of online bookmarks was my hatred for the tiresome task of importing and exporting bookmarks at several locations, the impossibility of keeping them synchronized on multiple machines with no hassle, my recent migration from the Windows based platform to the Macintosh world, and the inability to easily access my bookmarks from temporary locations. I had my reserves, mostly because I am slightly skeptical about what third-parties would do with my information, but figured I would give it a try anyway.

One of the first places I looked for keeping my ever-growing list of favorites online was the infamous del.icio.us. This website is the defacto king of bookmarks in the blogosphere, so I figured I would give it a shot. Unfortunately, I was severely disappointed.

While the website is popular and a good amount of people use it, I just did not see it as being very practical for me. The official decision came down to two factors that I just could not live with. The first being that every bookmark is shared with the entire world by default. While browsing their website will quickly show you why they have this feature, I personally do not want to participate. It is interesting to see that a specific web address (URL) has 3,453 people linking to it, but it is not so great to have people scouring my bookmarks in detail.

The second feature was the layout. By default your bookmarks are listed by date, with the most recently added towards the top of your list. In a sidebar you have a list of tags (everything Web 2.0ish must have tags…i guess) that you assign to your bookmarks and clicking on one of these will display the bookmarks saved under that category. However, the bookmarks under that category are still listed by date (or title if you so choose) with the newest one on top. And while this system works for a few bookmarks, I do not see it being easily manageable once you get a few hundred pages bookmarked with 20 or 30 tags.

Maybe I am asking too much, but I want to conveniently find a bookmark from any computer using less mouse-clicks than it would using the traditional browser based bookmarking system. Is that really too much to ask? Apparently!

I tried a few other online managers such as MyWeb by Yahoo, MyBookmarks, Google Bookmarks and just about any other web-based service that will let you mark a page for later viewing and none of them really provide the type of experience I was looking for. So finally, at the point when I was ready to abandon the idea, I found salvation in the most unlikely place; Google Reader.

Google Reader is actually not an online bookmarking system. Instead, it is a news aggregator. Fortunately for me, most of the websites I visit on a daily basis and therefore care to bookmark have feeds that I can subscribe too. In addition, Google Reader allows you to “star” an item (anyone who uses Gmail will know exactly how this works) for later retrieval. This makes browsing a website, coming across an interesting article, and saving it to read later an absolute breeze. As an added bonus, Google Reader is accessible and easy to use from mobile phones.

Now what about those pages with no feeds that you want to save for future reference? Well, given the absolute letdown of the above services, I decided to go with the one I disliked the least; Google Bookmarks. I actually dislike Google Bookmarks because the navigation has the same issues as del.icio.us, but it wins my vote for no reason other than the fact that bookmarks are kept private by default. I understand everyone’s love for sharing, but I simply prefer to have the option of sharing something over the option of keeping something private.

In closing, I think there is serious room for improvement in the world of online bookmarking. While del.icio.us is great for finding interesting sites that other users have come across recently, it, like the others, does not do a great job of managing bookmarks in a way that is convenient for the user. So until that time arrives, I guess I will keep adding pages to the poorly designed Google Bookmarks.

Random Information: I did decide to use my del.icio.us account after all. I use it to keep a running list of “interesting” websites I come across that I want to share but not write about. You can find those in the “Notable Mentions” section in the sidebar.