I’ve recently been exploring the concept of “social bookmarking”. I have been using the del.icio.us service and I was posting about that a few days ago. I’ve now got over 170 items marked for future reference anywhere I can log onto the web – you can browse my profile and see what I’ve been looking at.

However, I’m now in a bit of a quandary, as I’ve discovered ma.gnolia, a more recently released service that operates in a very similar area (yes, isn’t it trendy to have a website name with idiosyncratic punc.tuati.on!). It hasn’t yet got quite the same level of flexibility as del.icio.us (eg. no tagroll script, at least when I checked earlier this week) but it is indisputably a lot prettier.

Why does that matter? If I were just using it for myself, I’d almost certainly stick with del.icio.us, which has a lot more subscribers. Since one of the key points about these new systems is that you can discover new things of interest by looking at the choices of others who have also marked the same sites you’ve already found, that is a significant advantage.

However, I also want to encourage other people I know to start using these services. As well as benefiting from the gleanings of people I don’t know, I’d like to stay in touch with what my friends are turning up. I wonder if it would be easier to persuade people to use the nicer looking service?

I’m still pondering, although I think the utilitarian functionality of del.icio.us is likely to win the day for me. I am interested in how I can extract the data and incorporate it in my sites and ma.gnolia is still behind in this respect. We’ll see!

Tags: del.icio.us, ma.gnolia, social bookmarking, web2.0