Ask News.Yc: What is social bookmarking lacking today?

4 points by twism ↗ HN
I know, i know...they are a tons of social bookmarking sites out now, but they all seem cluttered, slow, and confusing to me. Im trying to get a feel of what features poeple like, dislike or they would like to see implemented.

News.YC is sort of a bookmarking app (at least the way I use it).It works great for me because its fast, has a clean layout and it just so happens to deal with web pages I would typically bookmark. but the internet isnt all about startups and entrepreneurship.

Any input would be great. Thanks

7 comments

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One word: community.
Thats a given... I was wondering along the lines of technical features.
Well, you have to enable a community through the technical features, is the thing. The community has to be intrinsic in the tech.
Just don't forget the users who could care less about the community and just want a place to put save bookmarks. Google Bookmarks is good for this, but I like to categorize my bookmarks in bulk and Google does not work well for this.
CoReap is one service that I've started using more frequently off-late. It combines social search and social bookmarking with a no-frills browser sidebar for bookmarks management and a browser extension for social search integration. See: http://www.coreap.com
The first suggestion that comes to mind is to automate as much of the process as possible. I rarely use social bookmarking sites because, 1) they waste more time than they save, and 2) I don't have the patience to sort through the details of URL submission.

See if you can develop a heuristic to determine a user's favorite sites based on their browsing patterns. Convolve that into a set of browser extensions and expose the user data through a web front-end. Make personalized suggestions based on user history. Auto-generate site summaries by looking at page markup (size of fonts, page title), that sort of thing.