online networking

A1-Webmarks…. if you are like me, you’ve never heard of it before and just think – jeesh!  another site to have to worry about. So let’s check it out.

At first glance I see that it was very recently added to Add-This (mid-late October of 2009).   They define as “Webmark” as follows:

A webmark marks a location on the web, just like a bookmark marks a location in a book. It’s a web page, whose address you want to remember for some reason. Webmarks are often called bookmarks or favorites, especially when the webmark itself is stored offline on your PC.

Furthermore… A1 stands for:  Anywhere, 1 Click Away. If that’s true, then in theory I already like this service because I feel I’ve got bookmarks on sites all over the darn place.  Here’s what they tell me they claim they offer:

• Hierarchical tagging of webmarks to assign them to a topic
• Instant access to your most often used webmarks (your favorites)
• Alphabetic indexing of your webmarks
• Personal evaluation of webmarks
• Private webmarks and private comments, visible only to you
• Webmarks to password-protected areas or to your local intranet or files
• Webmark search
• Periodic checks of your webmarks to let you know, which pages are no longer accessible
• Import and export of webmarks

And the social aspect of what they say they offer:

• Sophisticated evaluation of the community’s webmark evaluations to show you “more webmarks like that” for all of your topics
• Most popular webmarks amongst all A1-Webmarks users, separated by language
• Most popular tags and their corresponding most popular webmarks
• Access to the public webmarks and public comments of other A1-Webmarks users
• Publishing lists of interesting webmarks on some specific topic
• Rating of lists and list entries
• Making proposals for new list entries

At first glance it appears to be much like the other Social Bookmarking sites out there, but not as “pretty” or dolled-up.  The interface loads quickly, but it also includes banner ads.

I see the advantages of this site with the ratings and evaluations of links, rather than just ranking based on number of bookmarks.  I see the advantage of some of the organization and tagging methods behind the ‘webmarks’ and such.  It looks like it’s a good service that may be up-and-coming.

I have to say personally for me.  I probably, at most, will be a very basic user of A1-Webmarks for the time being – only because of the time factor, and the number of sites I already need to manage.  I may down the road decide to import and organize my bookmarks fully into this service, but for today I will pass.

As it rates/ranks and allows you to vote on webmarks and lists, it gives no point of reference on how those approval rating are calculated, the number of “members” or people voting.  So until I learn more – I have added a few basic ‘webmarks’ that will create incoming links to my favorite sites, and we’ll leave it that.

Know more about A-1 Webmarks than I do?  Please leave a comment and tell me why you like/dislike it.

{ 0 comments }