It’s been a few years since we first embraced the notion of social bookmarks. It’s been even less since they’ve become 1) popular, 2) spammable. Recently however, some of them have become even too spammed. The social element that was supposed to be the strength of these new “alternatives” of the old style search engines, as their creators have viewed them, has also gradually become their weakness.
Basically, we’ve seen the same story happen before, with just a few variations: forums, directories, blogs, now sb’s. A new web model evolves, then grows popular, then gets loved by the search engines, then get spammed. It’s inevitable. When spam gets automated, and the tools for it become widespread, you know the end is close – either that, or the model has to evolve somehow.
Recently, we’ve seen 3 possible scenarios for social bookmarking sites. A few months ago, Blogmarks, a PR6 authority bookmarking site posting a link to which ensured indexing within 24 hours in most cases, has switched its previously highly spammable user registration scheme to a more strict one. It managed to maintain its authority status, as for the spam level – it definitely reduced but as of today, I still see 282 entries for, say, porn – most of which are far from educational nature.
Just this month, social bookmarks at Ning went offline – the site now displays the following message:
‘Bookmarks’ has been taken offline by its owner
There is a high probability that it will return shortly. In the meantime, why not enjoy some of these other Social Networks on Ning.
It’s impossible to tell from the above if it’s dead for good – but that’s a scenario that’s been shared by a ton of smaller and less famous sb sites.
And the spammers’ all-time favourite, Netscape, has recently decided to switch to a non-social model. Evidently the live moderators were not enough to stop all the spam. Just as we thought that was it, news came that a new site has been launched to replace it, Propeller.com. Of course it will now take a while for it to reach the level of Google love the old Netscape has, but that will slow down the spam as well – so I guess they have achieved wjhat they wanted at least for some time. (Kudos to Jadehat for letting me know)
I suspect something new will evolve as a new web model some time soon, seeing the evolution repeating again. What would it be? Any ideas anyone?
I can’t say I know what the alternative / future is going to be. All I do know is that things do need to change as Social Bookmarking is quickly being taken over by spammers.
This has two issues. It makes the SB sites not worth visiting as the content isn’t so good. It also puts us who aren’t aiming to spam in the position where we could be seen as such as websites come down hard on everything (here speaks a banned Digg member…)