Pinboard is a simple, functional bookmarking site, reminiscent of Delicious in its pre-Yahoo! prime, but it comes with a small catch. To join Pinboard, there's a one-time fee based on the number of users who have signed up so far. The fee is $0.001 times the number of users already signed up. As of a moment ago, it's a little over $4.50 to get an account. Instead of "social bookmarking," pinboard is "antisocial bookmarking," designed not too get too big and too diluted with spam as quickly as Delicious did.

You get some pretty good features in exchange for your fee. Pinboard includes a separate, lightweight "to read" option, for stuff you want to come back to, but don't want to share or put in your main list. You can import or export Delicious bookmarks, and, as Pinboard's developer notes in a little dig at Ma.gnolia, there are nightly backups, so the risk of data loss is minimal. If a better, more streamlined Delicious is your cup of tea, you should join Pinboard now, before it gets too expensive.

Any thoughts on the price at which new memberships start to level off?

StumbleUpon may be one of the most innovative social website discovery services around. But the service has always had one major stumbling block: users needed to sign up for accounts and install a browser toolbar. And some percentage of potential users are just never going to take those steps.

Now StumbleUpon has removed those restrictions by rolling out a new version of the site that works without a browser toolbar. Just visit StumbleUpon and click on any web page to start stumbling. A JavaScript toolbar will show up in your browser window. You can find popular new web sites by hitting the stumble button, give stories a thumbs up, or rank them. If you have a StumbleUpon account you can also save pages. If not, hitting the save button will bring up an account registration screen.

It's also easier to find web sites from the main StumbleUpon page thanks to new categories like News, Art, Computers, Music, and Technology.

You can still use the toolbar if you like. But with the new StumbleUpon, it's no longer necessary.

[via WebWare]

Update: As C.K. Sample points out, the new toolbar-free StumbleUpon seems to be a ways off. When you visit the page, you will indeed find a JavaScript based toolbar that lets you stumble pages. But only if you're not logged into your account. When you click the stumble button, you're shuffled through a small group of pages, not the full StumbleUpon universe. And there's no way to save pages as favorites.

If you run a blog or other web site, odds are you already know how important social bookmarking sites like Digg, Reddit, and StumbleUpon can be for generating traffic. But while you may be used to seeing large traffic spikes from these sources occasionally, over time social bokmarking sites can give you yet another gauge of your blog's popularity. Have your stories been Dugg or stumbled more times than your competitors? SocialScan makes it easy to find out.

Just enter any URL into SocialScan and the service will look up the site on 12 different social bookmarking/news sites. Some measures are more thorough than others. For example, you'll only find out how many times that exact URL (ie: your homepage) has been submitted to sites like StumbleUpon or Reddit, while the Digg results will show any time a web page starting with your URL has been submitted.

[via MakeUseOf]

Diigo is a social bookmarking service which we covered briefly while it was in private beta. But the service is out of beta, and has launched a new set of tools that make it easy to mark up web pages, save pages to your account, and search through your bookmarks and those of other users.

The service has also added a recommendation engine. Since users are constantly saving and tagging web content, Diigo has a huge database of web pages that may feature similar content. So if you like pages about Windows freeware, Diigo probably knows that and when you click on the recommendations feed you should be able to find pages that you'll like.

[via ReadWriteWeb]

While Yahoo! fields merger/hostile takeover offers, the company's development team continues to push out new services. Today Yahoo! launched a retooled version of its video site. And Valleywag is reporting that the company will be launching a brand spanking new service on February 26th: A news and entertainment page featuring popular stories from around the web.

Yahoo! Buzz as it will reportedly be known will be something of a cross between Digg and Google Trends. Top stories will be chosen through a combination of user votes and popular search results.

But Digg has one thing that Yahoo! Buzz won't. At least not immediately. And that's a list of links from an unlimited number of web pages. Yahoo! Buzz will only feature links to about 100 web publishers at first. Eventually the company will reportedly open Buzz up to the Yahoo! Publisher Network, which means that anyone who sells Yahoo! ads on their site could be featured on Yahoo! Buzz.

While that might sound like a good reason for people to sign up for the publisher network, as incentive to get more social networking traffic, it also means that Yahoo! Buzz is by definition going to be more limited than Digg, StumbleUpon, or other social news and bookmarking sites. But this is all rumor and speculation at this point. It's possible Yahoo! Buzz won't be as limited as Valleywag suggests. Or maybe it's not even real.

If you go to buzz.yahoo.com today you'll find a page with top search results trends. But if Valleywag is correct, that site will be the future home of Yahoo! Buzz.

While del.icio.us Spy might sound like the name of an upcoming Austin Powers movie, it's actually a new way to find web pages using social bookmarking site del.icio.us. Like the popular Digg Spy visualization tool, Ajaxonomy's del.icio.us Spy presents new links as they're submitted. Each link includes a thumbnail and buttons that make it easy to add a page to your own del.icio.us account, or to Digg or Reddit.

You can also filter results by keyword so that you're more likely to find links you're interested in. Because let's face it, people submit all sorts of crap to del.icio.us, which makes del.icio.us Spy a bit more of a crap shoot than Digg Spy.

But somebody should totally write to Mike Myers about using the name on his next movie as well.

[via TechCrunch]

Iterasi is a new bookmarking service that allows users to save dynamic web content. What does that mean? Once upon a time web pages were relatively static. If you wanted to see the content of a web page, all you had to do was enter a URL and up pops your news article, movie listings, or photo collection. But today more and more sites are packed with dynamic content which changes regularly while the page's URL remains the same.

For example, imagine you're searching Google Maps and you zoom in and drag the map around. When you bookmark the page, all you get is a link to the map you saw when you started. Or what about pages that are changing every day like Techmeme or the New York Times? Sure, you could bookmark pages for individual articles, but what if what you really want to save is the equivalent of today's front page of the paper?

You could take a screenshot of those pages, but once you save the text content as an image file, you lose the ability to search the page. And that makes it pretty unlikely that you'll be able to find that page again when you need it. Iterasi solves this problem (even if you didn't know it was a problem) by creating snapshots of web sites using a process the company calls "notarizing."

All you have to do is install a browser toolbar and click the notarize button any time you see a page you want to save. It will be saved in its current state to Iterasi's online service. The page includes active links, searchable text, and everything else you could need. You can find your content by logging into your account from any web browser. You can also add notes and tags to pages for easier indexing. And of course, you can share pages with your friends. Iterasi also includes a scheduling application for saving pages at regular intervals. So if you want to save the front page of your local paper once a day or 6 times a day, you can schedule automated backups.

[via Mashable]

Are you the sort of person who likes to bookmark interesting web pages on del.icio.us, submit important or odd articles to digg, share rumors with Truemors, and send funny pictures of cats to your Twitter followers? Then have we got a Firefox add-on for you.

Sharealic is a Firefox add-on that works with Firefox 2, 3, and Flock and Songbird. It adds a handy menu to Firefox that lets you submit any web page to a ton of social bookmarking sites or similar services with just a few clicks. Sure, there are plenty of other ways to share items with your friends, but if you like to spread your love across multiple services, Shareaholic can save you a lot of time.

Shareaholic also lets you know at a glance how many times a page has been dugg or submitted to del.icio.us. Of course, if you'd rather submit a site to multiple services all at once, you might want to check out the Mahalo multi-submit toolbar. Shareaholic requires you to submit your links to one service at a time.

[via Mashable]

Want to set up a Digg-like site that lets users vote on the cutest photos of puppies, the best photos of overdressed people in fast food restaurants, or the most interesting news affecting your small town community? Pligg lets anyone with a little technical know-how set up their own personal Digg.

But if you have a big idea and no idea how to design a site, Pligg wants to help. The company plans to launch a new service called Fraxi soon. Fraxi will let users set up a hosted social bookmarking/voting site with the URL "yourname.fraxi.com." Since there's no need to upload any code to your own server, the setup process should be simple enough for novices. All you'll have to do is choose from a list of options on Fraxi's website.

There's not much more in the way of details. But so far it sounds like Fraxi will be for Digg-clones what Blogger is for blogs, or what Ning is for social networks: Super easy to use, and not necessarily as powerful or pretty as alternative services that require a bit more elbow grease.

[via Mashable and Pligg Blog]

If you're starting your own blog, there's no question that WordPress is one of the most customizable, powerful blogging platforms around. But Google's blogger is attractive because it doesn't require a hosting solution, and it's ridiculously easy to use.

On the other hand, there are hundreds of plugins for WordPress that just don't work with Blogger. That's starting to change, and it's not necessarily because Google is rolling out support for new features. No, it's because developers are moving away from hosted scripts and offering up javascript based applications.

ShareThis is a popular WordPress plugin that puts a little "share this" icon near every post on your blog. Click it and you get the option to email the post to your friends or submit it to several popular social bookmarking sites..

Up until recently, you could only install ShareThis on WordPress blogs. But now the company has released ShareThis 2.0, which is a javascript version that works with Blogger as well. Well, almost works. Right now there's an error that prevents ShareThis from showing up on more than one post per page. But the team is working to fix that problem.

ShareThis 2.0 loads slower than ShareThis 1.0, but because of the redesign, you can track how people are using your ShareThis icons. If you'd rather install the old version of the plugin, it's still available.

[via Digital Inspiration]

Social bookmarking/web discovery site StumbleUpon maintains a list of user statistics. It just doesn't make that list available to the public. So if you want to see who the most active or popular stumblers are, StumbleUpon won't tell you.

That's where StumbleRank comes in. The unofficial page comes from blogger Muhammad Saleem of ProNet Advertising. The site shows the StumbleUpon users who have submitted the most pages, photos, videos and reviews, as well as the stumblers with the largest number of "fans."

Because the list doesn't come from StumbleUpon, don't expect an accurate list of all the actual top stumblers. You only get added to the list if someone submits your username. The site then checks your StumbleUpon profile and updates the list. As time goes by, we suspect more and more names will get added making StumbleRank a fairly reliable measure of StumbleUpon popularity.

[via Mashable]

Here's what SugarLoving does right: the site clearly understands that sites like Digg and Del.icio.us have gotten so huge that it takes forever to wade through the cruft to find interesting things to read. Niche-driven sites like SugarLoving are a good idea because they offer a place for people with similar interests to congregate, instead of trying to be everything to everyone.

But the pink and powder blue hearts have to go.

It's hard to take the site seriously when it's awash in graphics like "i (heart) this" and the tagline reads "Link love." (Yeah, yeah...SugarLoving...hearts, love...we get it). It's overkill, though, and reads like an overblown Valentine's Day card.

On a purely technical note, we're surprised there's no way to bury or vote down a story but maybe since the site is still new, that feature is still to come.

The folks at Sugar, Inc. have a good idea with this Web site, if they could just tone it down a bit and realize that all women are not shallow, shop-a-holic clones. If SugarLoving beefs up the business and tech sections, and adds some sports and news categories, they'd have a site geared toward a greater cross-section of women -- and one that's more inviting that it is now.