When you think back to the dawning of the internet, it can be amusing to recall how far we have come in terms of connecting to the internet, conducting web searches, and saving bookmarks. So what is all this hoopla about online bookmark managers like Delicious bookmarks?
When Delicious bookmarks were introduced in 2003, it was the first successful social bookmarking site. In fact, the term social bookmarking is a term that originated by its creators. While the history of social bookmarks can be traced all the way back to 1996 and pioneering sites like itList and WebTagger, those sites and several copycats dissipated along with the dot.com bubble.
Until Delicious appeared, options available to save bookmarks, let alone to share with your friends, was limited to say the least. Most people would simply save their web pages, links, and photos to the Favorites in their antiquated Microsoft browsers. While this worked well enough for individual web users who were simply looking for a way to store and access their favorite websites, they were pretty useless if they found themselves working on a different computer, or if they wanted to share them with friends.
Fortunately, those days are history and have been for more than a decade now. Even better, we now have more options than ever to not only bookmark this page or that page, but to access our bookmarks from any computer and share them with others. There are actually too many cool and easy to use online bookmark managers than we really have time to get into. Even though Delicious is the oldest active social bookmarking site, it remains the fifth most popular one on the web. The only sites that are more popular are Twitter, Pinterest, Reddit, and StumbleUpon.
Whether web users still prefer Delicious or opt for newer online bookmark managers, the important thing is they have more options than ever before. And when you think about how far social bookmarking has come over the last 15 years it makes you wonder what things will look like 10 years down the road. Beam me up Scotty.