User:Roya.hosseini/sandbox

A social bookmarking service is a centralized online service which enables users to add, annotate, edit, and share bookmarks of web documents. Many online bookmark management services have launched since 1996; Delicious, founded in 2003, popularized the terms "social bookmarking" and "tagging". Tagging is a significant feature of social bookmarking systems, enabling users to organize their bookmarks in flexible ways and develop shared vocabularies known as folksonomies.

History
The concept of shared online bookmarks dates back to April 1996 with the launch of itList, the features of which included public and private bookmarks. Within the next three years, online bookmark services became competitive, with venture-backed companies such as Backflip, Blink, Clip2, ClickMarks, HotLinks, and others entering the market. They provided folders for organizing bookmarks, and some services automatically sorted bookmarks into folders (with varying degrees of accuracy). Blink included browser buttons for saving bookmarks; Backflip enabled users to email their bookmarks to others and displayed "Backflip this page" buttons on partner websites. Lacking viable revenue models, this early generation of social bookmarking companies failed as the dot-com bubble burst — Backflip closed citing "economic woes at the start of the 21st century". In 2005, the founder of Blink said, "I don't think it was that we were 'too early' or that we got killed when the bubble burst. I believe it all came down to product design, and to some very slight differences in approach."

Founded in 2003, Delicious (then called del.icio.us) pioneered tagging and coined the term social bookmarking. Frassle, created by Shimon Rura, was also made public in November 2003. This system provided a social bookmarking environment allowing users to publish both links and original text in their own blog, and also offered a number of features including an RSS aggregator. In 2004, as Delicious began to take off, similar services Furl and Simpy were released, along with Citeulike and Connotea (sometimes called social citation services) and the related recommendation system Stumbleupon.

Flickr, Spurl.net, and unalog were another social bookmarking services which were released in 2004. Flickr is a widely used for managing images, however, Flickr is so similar in purpose to the other social bookmarking tools. Instead of bookmarking websites it allows users to easily load and collect images on their web site. Once the images are there one may add titles, descriptions and tags. In 2006, Ma.gnolia (later renamed to Gnolia), Blue Dot (later renamed to Faves), Mister Wong, and Diigo entered the bookmarking field, and Connectbeam included a social bookmarking and tagging service aimed at businesses and enterprises. In 2007, IBM released its Lotus Connections product. In 2009, Pinboard launched as a bookmarking service with paid accounts. As of 2011, Furl, Simpy, Gnolia, and Faves are no longer active services. Digg was founded in 2004 with a related system for sharing and ranking social news, followed by competitors Reddit in 2005 and Newsvine in 2006. As of 2011, both Digg and Reddit are ranked in the top 300 websites in terms of web traffic by Alexa.com.

Uses
For individual users, social bookmarking can be useful as a way to access a consolidated set of bookmarks from various computers, organize large numbers of bookmarks, and share bookmarks with contacts. Institutions including businesses, libraries, and universities have used social bookmarking as a way to increase information sharing among members. Social bookmarking has been also used to improve web search.

Libraries using social bookmarking
Libraries have found social bookmarking to be useful as an easy way to provide lists of informative links to patrons. The University of Pennsylvania (UP) was one of the first library adopters with its PennTags.

Social bookmarking for education
Social bookmarking tools are an emerging educational technology that has been drawing more of educators' attention over the last several years. This technology offers knowledge sharing solutions and a social platform for interactions and discussions. These tools enable users to collaboratively underline, highlight, and annotate an electronic text, in addition to providing a mechanism to write additional comments on the margins of the electronic document. For example, Delicious could be used in a course to provide an inexpensive answer to the question of rising course materials costs. RISAL (Repository of Interactive Social Assets for Learning) is another social bookmarking system used for supporting teaching and learning at the university level.

Social bookmarking tools have several purposes in an academic setting including: organizing and categorizing web pages for efficient retrieval; keeping tagged pages accessible from any networked computer; sharing needed or desired resources with other users; accessing tagged pages with RSS feeds, cell phones and PDAs for increased mobility; allowing librarians and instructors the capability to follow students' progress; and giving students another way to collaborate with each other and make collective discoveries.