The layout

The layout is much more modern. Before, the site was a little bland. The newer layout is much more graphical because of the new feature they have named Stacks.

There is also the classic look with featured links. As you can see, this view is pretty much the same as before the site was purchased.

Stacks

Stacks are what they are calling Playlists for the web. They are a cool way to group your findings on the web and easily share them with your friends. To start making a stack, make sure you are logged into Delicious. Click the Create a Stack button on the homepage.

On the next screen, you will be asked to name the stack and add a bit of info about it. If you are going to share the stack publicly, you will probably want to let people know what they are going to be looking at. Make a snappy title and give a decent explanation of the kinds of links you are adding.

You will need to add one link to the stack to be able to save it for editing or publishing later.

Now, whenever you are on the web and use the bookmarklet or other method to add a link to your Delicious bookmarks, you can add it to a stack you have created.

Select the stack you would like to add to from the drop-down or choose new stack. If you choose to create a new grouping, you will be taken to the screen where you fill in the title and intro information.

The rest of the site

The rest of Delicious was freshened up a bit with similar but different graphics. The operation didn’t change much. You can still use the bookmarklet, Firefox and Chrome add-ons and the IE buttons to add links to your account.

The look of the pop-up screen has been redesigned a little. You have the bar to add tags and a box for information about the link. The main difference is the stacks drop down.

Conclusion

The overall feel of Delicious is the same. The addition of a more visual grouping will probably give Delicious a more modern feel and revive the user base a bit. Hopefully the new ownership with put the social back into this great social bookmarking site.

Are you a Delicious Bookmarks user? If so, what are your thoughts on stacks?

Related Posts:

• Skloog – Visual Bookmarking and More
• Do You Wish to See Delicious Shut Down? [Poll]
• Zootool: Visit your Wild Bookmarks In The Zoo
• Automatically Save Tweeted Links With Packrati.us

Poll results and this week’s poll after the jump.

The question for this week’s poll is: Do You Wish to See Delicious Shut Down?

At first, Yahoo said that it’s going to shut down Delicious. Next, it said that it is going to offload Delicious (instead of shutting it down). What about you? Do you wish to see Delicious get shut down?

Take Our Poll

Feel free to comment if you are using other bookmarking services.

Related Posts:

• Performing Search In iOS: What’s Your Alternatives?
• First Look At The New Delicious Bookmarking Site
• How To Send Emails Using Another Gmail Account
• Do You Feel Safe Storing Your Files/Information Online? [Poll]

Zootool is a web-based bookmarking site offering some added perks over similar bookmarking sites. Do you want a better way to save your favorites other than in your browser? If you use sites like Digg or Delicious to save your bookmarks you will want to read on.

Visual

What I like about Zootool is how visual it is. I have used sites like Delicious pretty frequently. To be blunt, Delicious is a pretty boring site.

Having something a bit more graphically pleasing to the eye can help a bit when you are a frequent user.

Social

It would be hard for any application or site to operate these days without some sort of social interaction with your friends or potential friends. Zootool’s home page shows popular tags and popular pages saved.

If you are a using a site like Digg or Stumbleupon, you will see some similarities. The socialness of the site is pretty apparent.

Apple type layout

Many of the stylings are very Apple-like. Very clean, simple and there is only what is needed and nothing more. When you are in the “Zoo” you will see what I mean. It almost seems as though you are in an Apple web-app.

Bookmarklet

Using a bookmarklet can speed up the process of adding a bookmark. Drag the small bit of Java code to your bookmark bar. Later, when you are surfing the web and see a page you’d like to come back to, click the Zootool bookmarklet to save the page.

Packs

Packs are categories to better sort your bookmarks. When you are saving a site, you will have the option to add tags, whether you want the bookmark to be public as well as a pack.

Initially the drop down will only show New Pack. If you want to create new packs, the easiest way is to go to your Zoo and press the plus sign in the bottom left corner of the page.

Pictures

When you are saving a page, Zootool will pull up all of the images on the page and offer the option to save them. If you are bookmarking a search on a photo site like Flickr, this is a very useful feature.

When you save a picture, it will save a link to the full size image. If you simply save the page and not a specific picture, the image associated with the page will be a screen capture of the page.

Coming and going

Everyone knows how much it sucks to change services. Zootool lets you import up to 200 of your bookmarks. Most browsers and web-based bookmarking services offer an export option. By exporting your bookmarks to a file on your desktop, you can easily import them to your Zootool account.

Conclusion

I have to admit, I like the way it emulates the Mac application layout. It looks, feels and acts like it is a Mac desktop application. Drag and drop functionality along with a more visually appealing bookmarking site makes for a site much more exciting to use.

Image Japus (Own work) [GFDL, CC-BY-SA-3.0 or CC-BY-2.5], via Wikimedia Commons

Related Posts:

• First Look At The New Delicious Bookmarking Site
• KeepMeOut: Restrict Visiting Specific Websites Too Often
• 6 Different Ways to Bypass The Paywall And Access Articles on NYTimes.com
• Do You Wish to See Delicious Shut Down? [Poll]

I have written about a few bookmarking sites here on Make Tech Easier. Bookmarking sites like 43marks, myHomepage and Symbaloo. All of them have their pros and cons. Skloog has a list of features that others didn’t have at the time of writing those articles.

Sign up

You will need to set up an account. This is allows you to personalize your bookmarks and gives you a Skloog email address, more on that later. Setting up an account only takes a minute. Name, email address and password are all that’s required. You will need to activate your account by clicking on the link they email you.

Emailing a link

Being able to email a link into a bookmarking site is not a feature many sites offer. When you sign up for an account, they will issue you an email address. This email address is a direct path to creating a new bookmark without going to the site and logging in.

The process is what you would think it would be. Compose and email with 1 or more links and send it to your assigned email address. I like this option because you can send in a bunch of links at one time.

Importing to Skloog

Skloog lets you import the bookmarks you already have. This was a feature some of the others sites left out. In my opinion, it makes switching much more difficult if you need to start from scratch.

You have your choice of a few browsers and sites to import from. I like how they chose to include importing from Xmarks. For all of people who are using this soon to be extinct Firefox plug-in, this is a great way to capture all of your bookmarks.

Currently you cannot export your bookmarks from Skloog, however the feature is coming. It says so on the bottom of the bookmark importing page.

Finding your bookmarks

Once you have all of your bookmarks imported into Skloog, you have a couple of ways to track them down. You can use the search bar off to the left side of the page. The other way is to search using the category drop down.

Organizing your bookmarks

Organizing your bookmarks is pretty easy. You have the choice to use categories, tags or both. If you are adding a new bookmark manually, you can add all this information into the fields after you click Add A Bookmark in the left sidebar of the main screen.

If you import bookmarks from a browser or email a link to Skloog, you sill need to click on the My Bookmarks tab and add tags or categories manually. You can bulk add categories by clicking the box to the left of the bookmark, then clicking where is says Move to and selecting the category from the drop down.

Other notable features

I like bookmarklets. they make life easier for quick things like adding a bookmark. Skloog offers 2 different bookmarklets; one for adding a bookmark and the other takes you to your Skloog homepage.

The bookmarks displayed on the main page can be personalized to your favorite sites. You can then set Skloog to be your homepage.

The tabs just above the visual bookmarking window can be personalized giving you layers of organized bookmarks. If you use Skloog as your homepage, this will help the page seem less cluttered.

What would you add to make this your ideal bookmarking service?

Related Posts:

• First Look At The New Delicious Bookmarking Site
• Three Easy Ways to Synchronize Your Bookmarks Across Various Browsers
• Do You Wish to See Delicious Shut Down? [Poll]
• Zootool: Visit your Wild Bookmarks In The Zoo

The basic idea behind Packrati.us is to capture all of the links you talk about on Twitter.

Many people have a Twitter account. Most are using it to tell people what they are doing or chat back and forth. As these people get the hang of how easy it is to share information and sites of interest, it can be hard to keep track of all that information.

Delicious Bookmarks is site designed to help keep all of the websites you like or find useful, all in one location. Having your bookmarks stored online is a really handy for several reasons. Being able to access them from any computer or web enabled phone, subscribing to other peoples bookmarks and being able to link to a specific tag are just a few reasons to consider Delicious bookmarks.

So when you combine both Twitter and Delicious bookmarks, you got Packrati.us.

Where to Start

Sign in to your Twitter account via the Packrati.us site.

Follow Packrati.us on Twitter

If you have a newer Delicious account, you can sign into Yahoo. If you have an “old school” Delicious account, sign in with your user name and password.

What Happens Next

Once you are logged in, you can adjust your preferences. In these settings, you can add default tags, remove tags, bookmark links in @mentions to you to name some.

Time to Save

Now that everything is all set to go, all you need to do is tweet like normal. When you RT someone or post an update with a link in it, that link will automatically be saved to your Delicious bookmarks. Every link saved this way will have the tag [via:packrati.us].

Caution

Depending on your Tweeting habits and how organized you like to keep your Delicious bookmarks, this mashup can really get out of hand. I will admit i don’t have the most organized bookmarks, but I do like to use certain tags so I can find things later.

Something I am not sure I like is having EVERYTHING with a link saved. For example, I use a mashup (lastfmlovetweet.com) to tweet the songs I “love” when I am listening to Last.fm.

It saves the song with the #love and #lastfm hashtags as the Delicious tags.

Granted it is easy enough to search for these tags and delete the song links, it would be really cool in a future update to have a way to filter out certain sites or tags. The only option is to save tweets which include a user defined hashtag. Not that is a big deal, other sites (Facebook #fb and Linkedin #li) allow updates using this as well. It would be nice to see a filter working the opposite way considering the main use is to pack away pretty much everything you tweet.

Does automatically saving the links you tweet save you time?

Related Posts:

• How to Automate Your Social Media Life
• 5 Easy Ways to Schedule Your Tweets
• Three Easy Ways to Synchronize Your Bookmarks Across Various Browsers
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1. Foxmarks/Xmarks

Type: Browser Extension (Firefox, IE, Safari)

Saves: Bookmarks, Passwords

Xmarks (formerly Foxmarks) is a browser extension that allows you to synchronize bookmarks from several locations so that they can follow you anywhere. It used to be a Firefox-only extension, but now has extend its reach to Internet Explorer and Safari. The website has a type of content search where you can see reviews and ratings for many web sites based on the users of the Xmarks extension. With the Xmarks extension installed, you’ll also notice some new icons next to your Google search results indicating ratings and reviews for some of the sites in your search results.

Xmarks also includes an option to sync your saved passwords, so that you can keep the passwords saved in one browser and share them to all the others where you installed Xmarks.

To install the Xmarks extension, go to http://download.xmarks.com/download and choose the appropriate plugin for your browser.

2. delicious

Type: Browser Extension (Firefox, Internet Explorer 8, Safari, Chrome)

Saves: Bookmarks

Any topic on web bookmark services will always eventually lead to http://delicious.com/ (previously known as del.icio.us). This site has been around for a while and has always been a great place to store and share your bookmarks. Delicious also allows you to tag your bookmarks with keywords, so that you can search your (or other people’s) bookmarks based on tags. From the website you can search with those tags to see what bookmarks others have submitted on that topic.

The browser extension for Firefox can be found here.

The browser extension for IE8 can be found here

The browser extension for Safari can be found here

For Google Chrome, go to the delicious site and drag the bookmarklet to the bookmark bar.

3. Mozilla Weave

Type: Browser Extension (Firefox)

Saves: Bookmarks, browsing history, saved passwords and tabs

Finally, there’s Mozilla Weave. This is a much more ambitious project than just saving your bookmarks online. Weave is intended to let you keep a complete browser “experience” from one computer to the next. It saves much more info online so that you can access things like your browsing history and tabs along with bookmarks and passwords when roaming to a different Firefox installation. Keeping things like your browser history saved online would make it a lot easier to access that page-you-were-on-yesterday-but-can’t-quite-remember-the-name, or pull up that news article you just saw but isn’t on the site’s front page anymore.

Weave appears to be a very useful tool, but unfortunately it seems to require Firefox 3.5, which is still in development. If you’re really excited to try out Weave but don’t want to wait until 3.5 is officially released as stable, you can get information on download and installation at the Mozilla Labs website.

There are some other options out there that I chose not to include in this article for various reasons such as platform portability or concerns about data privacy. If you’re using a bookmark sync program/extension to manage your bookmarks, I’d like to hear about your experiences in the comments below.

Related Posts:

• Skloog – Visual Bookmarking and More
• Firefox 4 Review: App Tab, Panorama and Sync
• Automatically Save Tweeted Links With Packrati.us
• How to Easily Upgrade your Firefox to 3.5 (and future version) in Ubuntu