The web-based service that saves and categorizes personal collections of Internet bookmarks and then shares them with the other Internet users is called social bookmarking. With social bookmarking, a person records various lists of resources he or she finds in the Internet which he or she thinks of as useful. It is befitting for people in a particular network, sharing the same interest to share each other’s information.

Social bookmarking provides opportunities for the users to save particular links to any web pages that the users may want to share or remember. Usually, these bookmarks are public but can be privately saved or shared with specified groups or individuals, or may be shared among members of certain networks or may also be as a combination between private and public domains. The people who are given access can view the bookmarks chronologically through a search engine or by tags or category.

In general, social bookmarking accomplishes two different things. First of which is that, bookmarks may be accessible not only from one computer but primarily from any unit attached to the Internet. And then second, as you keep in your browser an endless list of disarrayed bookmarks and favorites, now you have the opportunity to create a wonderful database of highly organized and orderly bookmarks for you to conveniently and effortlessly find what you want and need. You may find reviews and basic overviews on the Internet about social bookmarkings, as well as quick tutorials that will prove to be befitting and very helpful for you.

At present, most of the social bookmarking services impel users to assort their bookmarks using informal tags rather than the accustomed browser-based folders, though some of the services come with folders and or categories, or a combination of both tags and folders. Additionally, such services enable the users to view bookmarks linked to a chosen tag, and also include relevant information such as how many users have bookmarked them.

A lot of these bookmarking services offer web feeds for the various lists of bookmarks, which include the lists as arranged by tags, benefiting subscribers to be constantly aware of recent bookmarks just added or saved, tagged or shared by the other users. With the rampant uses of these services leading to its popularity and ascending growth, extra features have been added like comments on ratings are made possible on bookmarks, emailing of any bookmarks, the ability to export and import bookmarks from its browsers, web annotation, and other features from social network groups.

Social bookmarking has its varied advantages as well as disadvantages over the tradition classification software and automated resource locations. Among its many advantages is the so-called “search engine spiders.” Tag-based classified Internet resources like web sites are all created by people who are able to apprehend the depth of the resource contrary to software, which only attempts to algorithmically determine the entire meaning of the resources. As a result, you get semantically categorized tags that are difficult to find with the current search engines. Moreover, as more and more people bookmark useful resources, these resources will be bookmarked by other users, which then will ranked them according to usage and not based on external links which are pointed to it.

Meanwhile, the drawbacks for tag-based systems include: the unavailability of sets of keywords or otherwise called as controlled vocabulary, no set of structures for the tags such as capitalization, singular or plural, tags with more than one meaning, highly personalized and unorthodox tags schemes, unclear tags because of antonym and synonym confusion, mistagging due to errors in spelling and few others. However, the services that allow both folders and tags to organize bookmarks like Netvouz minimize these problems. Besides Netvouz, other renowned social bookmarking sites are StumpleUpon, Furl, Thoof, Sitebar, Digg, Newsvine, del.icio.us, and Reddit.