Facebook dabbles in social bookmarking

Filed under: Video, Web services, Social Software

Facebook dabbles in social bookmarking

by Jordan Running Oct 25th 2006

TechCrunch's Marshall Kirkpatrick is reporting that Facebook is dipping its toes into del.icio.us territory with a new social bookmarking feature. Given the recent controversies over the News Feed feature and Facebook's opening for all users, the company is currently only letting Stanford and Berkeley users in on a private beta. The new sharing feature lets Facebook users bookmark both outside sites as well as Facebook pictures, notes, and profiles, and users can choose to share a bookmark publicly on their profile (in which event it will may appear on their friends' News Feed) or privately with the friends they choose. The bookmarking can be done by entering a URL into a form, clicking on a browser bookmarklet, or clicking on a "Share" button next to an item on Facebook. Justin Smith at Inside Facebook has more images of the feature in action, which show a YouTube video being bookmarked. It looks like Facebook is smart enough to recognize that it's a video and put a thumbnail image in feeds as well as a full embedded player in your profile. Smith says it recognizes MP3s, too, and does the same.

I think this is a very cool feature, but though I don't think it will cause a stir like the News Feed did initially, I have a feeling that Facebook will be hearing its share of complaints. In the end, though, if they make great features that users ultimately find useful, even if the mere thought of change scares them at first, everybody wins.

Tags: del.icio.us, facebook, links, share, social bookmarking, social networking, social software, SocialBookmarking, SocialNetworking, SocialSoftware, youtube

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Engineer_This said 2:31AM on 10-26-2006

I've been a Facebook member for almost two years now, and I've been very satisfied. Just about the time you start to get bored with the features you have, they add something else that will keep you occupied and distracted for hours. Props to Zuckerberg and his crew for making my study sessions on the computer take hours longer than they should, and bring on the social bookmarking for everyone, dammit! :)

Bob said 7:55AM on 10-26-2006

The placement of the newsfeed is killing Facebook off completely. People click around the website to discover new people and the quickest and most addicting way of doing that is having the Interest, Favorite Movies, and About Me sections located higher on the page for people to quickly read through. With the newsfeed in the way, it has completely ruined this. Putting videos of stupid stuff from YouTube will completely kill Facebook off. Just watch it happen. Facebookers are smart college students, and putting dumb crap from around the web in place of their profiles is idiotic.

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