History
The concept of shared online bookmarks dates back to April 1996 with the launch of itList, the features of which included public and private bookmarks. Within the next three years, online bookmark services became competitive, with venture-backed companies such as Backflip, Blink, Clip2, ClickMarks, HotLinks, and others entering the market. They provided folders for organizing bookmarks, and some services automatically sorted bookmarks into folders (with varying degrees of accuracy). Blink included browser buttons for saving bookmarks; Backflip enabled users to email their bookmarks to others and displayed "Backflip this page" buttons on partner websites. Lacking viable revenue models, this early generation of social bookmarking companies failed as the dot-com bubble burst — Backflip closed citing "economic woes at the start of the 21st century". In 2005, the founder of Blink said, "I don't think it was that we were 'too early' or that we got killed when the bubble burst. I believe it all came down to product design, and to some very slight differences in approach."
Founded in 2003, Delicious (then called del.icio.us) pioneered tagging and coined the term social bookmarking. Frassle, a blogging system released in November 2003, included social bookmarking elements. In 2004, as Delicious began to take off, similar services Furl, Simpy, Spurl.net, and unalog were released, along with CiteULike and Connotea (sometimes called social citation services) and the related recommendation system Stumbleupon. Also in 2004, the social photo sharing website Flickr was released, and inspired by Delicious it soon added a tagging feature. In 2006, Ma.gnolia (later renamed to Gnolia), Blue Dot (later renamed to Faves), Mister Wong, and Diigo entered the bookmarking field, and Connectbeam included a social bookmarking and tagging service aimed at businesses and enterprises. In 2007, IBM released its Lotus Connections product. In 2009, Pinboard launched as a bookmarking service with paid accounts. As of 2012, Furl, Simpy, Spurl.net, Gnolia, Faves, and Connectbeam are no longer active services.
Digg was founded in 2004 with a related system for sharing and ranking social news, followed by competitors Reddit in 2005 and Newsvine in 2006. As of 2011, both Digg and Reddit are ranked in the top 300 websites in terms of web traffic by Alexa.com.
Read more about this topic: Social Bookmarking
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