When you buy through affiliate links in our content, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Learn Social bookmarking is a form of shareable bookmarking that allows websites to be bookmarked on the Web using a service instead of using the browser’s bookmarking feature. This service also allows for easy sharing of the bookmarks. The sharing and collaboration feature explains the use of the word “social” in the term. Social bookmarking uses a form of tagging, which allows users to mark websites they want to bookmark with a keyword similar to how hashtags work in Twitter.
In social bookmarking, users save bookmarks to a public website by tagging them with keywords so that other people can also find them if they are marked as public rather than as private, or they can share them explicitly. Social bookmarking is especially useful for creating a list of resources, for example, for academic purposes or simply for sharing with other people who share the same interests as the user.
The benefit of social bookmarking as opposed to local bookmarking is that the user can organize the sites better and then share them. Bookmarking is also straightforward; as with regular bookmarking, the user only needs to press a button or icon that appears after a browser extension has been installed. The main feature of social bookmarking is the ability to share, which is incredibly difficult to do using the browser’s bookmarking feature. With local bookmarking, the user would need to manually copy all of the addresses that have been bookmarked into a separate text file or a chat box for sharing with friends; with social bookmarking, however, all of the bookmarked sites are already available in a form ready for sharing, which removes the hassle of the former.
