Social Bookmarking The Way It Was Meant To Be (Social)
06/27/2007, 1 year 2 months ago
Is it interesting to find out a new bookmarking service is launched? You may already know my opinion: I think we already have too many duplicates for most of the web services already. But it is really very interesting to hear news about something that definitely aims directly at del.icio.us and plans to compete with the leader - not with some smaller players in the field. So when I got to know a new social bookmarking service that promises to be better than del.icio.us and states it is already more popular in Europe I was impressed. So I went there to take a look. And now I think they have a chance to win.
The service is named Mister Wong and until today it has not been available in English. Mister Wong was founded in Germany in March 2006, and since then has become the leading social bookmarking service in Europe with more than 2 million monthly visitors in Europe alone. Now they provide specialized bookmarking portals in other languages - Russian, Chinese, French and Spanish. I have visited the Russian version and found it to be an active bookmarking community - though it is definitely too early to tell it has plenty of bookmarks but still you can easily find some Russian-language gems here.
The English version is currently in the closed beta and I think it is a good idea to keep it closed and get as much feedback as possible from the choosy blogging and bookmarking English-speaking community because although the website is impressive it looks like it needs some minor changes to be actually welcomed by many frequent del.icio.us users. But anyway one thing where Mister Wong clearly leaves del.icio.us behind is the social aspect: unlike many other bookmarking services Mister Wong actually focuses on social side of bookmarking - here you can create your profile (for other users to be able to find you, join various specialized public and private groups and add other members as buddies. You can also create your own group according to your interests and choose if you want to make it public or private (so that only group members could see the bookmarks in the group). After you join a group (it takes only one click) you will be able to send your bookmarks to the groups and their members will start voting on the bookmarks (simply up or down).
As for actual bookmarking operations the service is superb, it provides absolutely everything I could think of as a nice feature. Adding a bookmark can easily be done via the web or using browser toolbar, buttons or extensions (the bookmark is named, described and tagged as usually). Besides, you can import your existing bookmarks from your browser and from del.icio.us - I tested both options and they worked absolutely smoothly. After importing your bookmarks you can perform group operations on them (changing tags). It is also possible to change status of bookmarks (those you import from browsers have the default private status while those you import from del.icio.us - public), delete them or recommend to your friend by email or by typing the buddies' usernames (here my suggestion would be to provide me with a list of all buddies to choose from in the event I do not remember exactly what the username of the buddy I want to share the bookmark with is).
Tags that are always located in your right sidebar make navigation easier for you (you can choose between tag cloud or list view for tags). You can also join several tags into separate tag bundles so that you could easily browse all your bookmarks tagged with related words.
Mister Wong also offers you some nice search options - instead of searching inside the body of the whole bookmark you can specify if you want to search the bookmarks themselves or tags; it is also possible to search your own or community's bookmarks. Again, everything concerning bookmarks is really intuitive and the service actually provides features you have not had before but will soon be unable to live without, I think.
What I actually like best about Mister Wong is its friendly and simple design. It is very clean, the space is not cluttered but at the same time it is not as terribly boring as del.icio.us (where I know how bookmarking works but am often unwilling to spend any extra time browsing bookmarks not to be bored to death). But honestly, in some cases usability is not perfect: for example, after you delete an existing bookmark you will be sent to a blank confirmation page instead of to where you were before that - in the bookmarks list. So you will need to click My favorites link to be taken back. And I don't think it's wise to complicate your users with two different words for bookmarks on one website: when you want to submit a new bookmark via the web you will need the ‘Bookmark' section while to perform operations on your existing bookmarks you will need the ‘Favorites' section. I do hope that the status of the closed beta will allow the developers to change certain usability issues before letting the mainstream users rant about them.
Another thing I think I should mention is that I would prefer to have at least some synchronization between different language portals of Mister Wong. I mean, I registered for the English version first but I could not register the same user name for the Russian version (though my English version login did not work here anyway). Besides, after I imported my browser bookmarks I noticed I had lots of Russian-language bookmarks and after hesitating for a while I had to leave them private while an option to transfer them to the Russian account could really be a big plus. I know, the idea behind Mister Wong is to build separate bookmarking resources for different languages but I know that many bilingual users will face the same problem after the English version is public and growing popular.
But anyway spending the whole 3 hours on a service I thought I would review in an hour at the most really means that I like it - Mister Wong works smoothly and is sufficiently intuitive and user-friendly even in the current state with the minor linguistic and usability disadvantages I have already mentioned. I do hope Mister Wong developers will give me some invitations for at least some of our readers to be able to see for themselves this exciting service so leave your comments below and I'll go plead for invites.
UPDATE: After asking for the invites I was told that everyone will get a personal invitation to Mister Wong after he or she leaves his e-mail address on www.mister-wong.com. So there's no need to worry you will have to wait for long before trying the service out - go ahead and simply ask for an invite.
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After a quick read of Mr Wong’s features I can’t find anything that is not already offered by Diigo. Of course everyone has their “tried and true” favorite tool, but Diigo allows users to bookmark a site, share it with groups, e-mail it to others and also save it to your account with other services - all with just one click.
Thanks for sharing, I have tried to register with Diigo but somehow all my attempts failed (the Continue button did not work). But from what I’ve see in the descriptions Diigo looks more like StumbleUpon (annotations, sharing in groups, etc.) though I can not be sure about that.
Anyway any social bookmarking service needs to be popular to actually be useful and I’m not sure how popular Diigo is.
Grrr, I partially understand German, and I know how to read Cyrillic, I just don’t understand Russian. So I can’t test the site itself. I’ll link to this article via my blog though.
Andrej, a quick note for you and everyone else: the developers told me that everyone who sends leaves e-mail at mister-wong.com will get an invite (maybe not instantly but still it is not as closed as many other services). So simply submit your email, you will get in there
(I guess I shall update the article accordingly not to confuse our readers.)
P.S. And thanks for linking to this review from your blog, I’m really happy you liked it
After reading the review, i wanted to try it out but unfortunately it is still in closed beta. I think it has the potential to become a greate social bookmarking tool but i also think there can be a lot of problems with the group notifications of bookmarks. People may abuse this feature and proliferate spam.
TomTom: It is easy to get in there - you should simply leave the email in the special field on the home page and you will be emailed a password to get in.
As for abuse, I would not say the group feature on StumbleUpon, for example, is abused - at least groups’ moderators seemed to handle everything easily and now they only allow group moderators to add new sites (while discussions are still open). But on Mister Wong it will be much easier: when a bookmark is sent to a group it is voted on by members and spam can easily be voted down. That’s a simple solution that works well on social news sites.
Social Bookmarking The Way It Was Meant To Be…
A new social bookmarking service Mister Wong launched in private beta that has high chances to compete with del.icio.us. It really brings bookmarking to social level.read more | digg story…
I guess social bookmarking services share the qualities of all tools in that each one is a little different and is therefore appropriate to jobs that are a little different.
As a high school teacher, I work in a community (by individual class and by the school itself) so the “social” part of the community is already defined. Diigo fits that community well.
The problem is for people who are just starting out. There are so many sites out there - how do they decide which one fits their situation?
Steve, you are absolutely right, they all differ in only minor things, not the major ones (in most cases, at least). Some of the services emphasize private sharing of bookmarks, other - traffic that they drive to a website once the bookmark is popular enough. In Mister Wong I actually like the focus on social aspect of bookmarking but it is the result of my work and my constant hunting for more quality news and services.
But anyway the only way you can find out which service is the best for you is to give several of them a try. Del.icio.us may be good for the entire internet community but not for me at least because I do not like the interface and that prevents me from spending really lengthy time there. But for some people del.icio.us is perfect and they will use it. That’s just a matter of tasks you need to accomplish with these services and only a handful of Web 2.0 experts can help you to choose the one that will best suits your needs. Otherwise you will need to try and a few and choose for yourself.
It’s a shame about the name and the frankly stereotyped caricature that marks the Mister Wong social bookmarking service. 8 Asians for one, aren’t that pleased…
It looks Ok to the German audience of Mister Wong. Besides, they also launched the Chinese version of the service recently (it is mentioned in the beginning of my entry) though I can hardly evaluate satisfaction of the Chinese users since I know no Chinese at all.
Mr. Wong brings nothing new to the social bookmarks field! Big deal language support, plus on different domains. Simpy[1] is a social bookmarking veteran and already supports about 10 different languages on the same domain and does NOT segregate users - Korean, Chinese (Simplified), German, Russian, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, French, and so on - see http://www.simpy.com/faq#browserLanguage for a list of all supported languages.
[1] http://www.simpy.com/
Feel free to write a review/comparison, I would LOVE to see what real people think about the two services.
Otis, did I mention language support was what I liked about Mister Wong? I don’t think so, really, I simply mentioned the supported languages as an introduction to launching the new English version.
Moreover, I suggested myself some sort of linking accounts on different websites because I had difficulties with my Russian-language bookmarks imported from my browser.
If you read the article carefully, my focus was on social side of bookmarking and I have not seen anything more social in the field (hence the title of my post). But anyway I’ll go give a closer look to Simpy since I never was intrigued enough to actually give it a try before. Now I really am
I have given a closer look to Simpy and I really did not want to stay on the site. For my taste the interface is ugly. Besides, it is really distracting to see bookmarks for the languages I don’t know at all on the home page. Moreover, I suspect you used machine translation to build the list of supported languages. Russian is terrible, really. I prefer to have a clear English to poor Russian, besides, you have left quite a lot of things in the original English (at least all the buttons I see are in English and it is even more distracting to have one half of the comments in one language and the second half - in Russian.
I guess I won’t review Simpy on Profy because it definitely will not be a positive review
Svetlana - thanks for taking the time. I do see only 12 minutes between your comments, so it must have been a super quick Simpy tour (yes, one could say all kinds of things regarding the time spent on Simpy). No, MT was not used for translations, as you can see on http://simpy.com/contributors . As a matter of fact, English to Russian translation was done by a Russian who is a translator on the side (both ways, I believe). Indeed, there are some left-over English bits - it’s hard keeping the translations up to date with the developing service/site, esp. when there are so many translations.
Still, I’d love to know what you think about the social side of Simpy, such as Groups, Watchlists, Watchlist filters, or even non-social things, such as Notes, the search functionality, the tag auto-suggest interface, and so on.
Otis, 12 minutes may not sound like a lot of time for you but when you visit hundreds of websites daily and choose one to review because you think it is worth a review usually even 5 minutes is enough. And it takes another hour or so to actually try out all the available features and tools. And honestly, Simpy just did not make me want to stay. Again, I did not find it aesthatically appealing and I just hate using websites that irritate my eyes. Another factor for me to leave hastily was the poor translation into Russian and the English-Russian mix I found immediately. I guess I had to register with Simpy to be able to switch the language to English only but I just did not want to. I’m kind of sure you will lose some multi-language users because of these things that seem to be minor but are important for people with linguistic background (I have over 7 years of experience as a translator myself).
But since you seem to be jenuinely interested in getting Simpy reviewed by me on Profy, I think I will make myself actually use the website and I promise to be as objective as possible (and objective means I will mention anything good I find as well as all the disadvantages). Stay tuned for the review
Svetlana - thanks for being open!
Note that you don’t have to log in to change the language. You actually dictate this with your browser settings. See the link at the end of this FAQ answer: http://www.simpy.com/faq#browserLanguage (screenshots included).
Otis, thanks for paying attention to the discussion here!
Honestly, one would never go hunting for FAQ simply to change the language back into English, you simply look for the Language button, nothing else. If you don’t see it, you start to believe it is not there. That’s just a small idea. I know, it is very important to read FAQs but I rarely do - it is kind of not what Web 2.0 is about because my best compliment to a website is when I tell it’s intuitive
But anyway, I’ll go and write a review of Simpy, I hope I will see more positive aspects than the negative ones I see now.
It’s nice to see that things are moving.
Svetlana: I look forward to the review, but if you could hold on with it for a little longer (August?), that would be great. Thanks.
Otis, sure thing, I was going to publish the review on Sunday but since I really hate publishing negative reviews I will be happy to wait until August (when I guess you are going to release some new features) to review Simpy on Profy and I hope I will see more things that I actually like. Send me an email to s.gladkova@profy.com with your news so that I could publish a review.
nice social bookmarking