People are sharing more information than ever before. Traffic on the Internet is almost constantly breaking records, ever increasing past what we thought was possible only months before. Users are exploring more and more of their online world. But even more importantly, they are able to share what they find more quickly and easily than ever.
Social bookmark tools have made the process of sharing interesting links a near artform. Links are no longer just found and copied, but annotated, ranked, rated, and tagged. In fact, tags have become such a dynamic feature of sharing links, that the best social bookmarking tools are attempting to standardize the “folksonomy”, or the ever evolving common language, of tags. By standardizing the language, tags can be more efficiently integrated into social bookmark tools for indexing, searching, page ranking, and even further opportunities for sharing.
Our online world can seem vast and full of endless possibilities, but at the exact same time, social media has made finding interesting content easier than ever. People can follow what their friends are following in ways unimagined by users of even a decade ago. Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, Pinterest… all these platforms allow users to almost instantly proliferate their likes, dislikes, and curiosities among a perpetually widening circle of increasingly interconnected people. Viral videos and memes rise and fall and churn on the waves of the Internet like bubbles in a pot of boiling water, and the “in” thing of this afternoon may fade to a mere memory by bedtime.
But an unexpected benefit of social bookmark tools comes, ironically enough, from the inherent sense of disconnectedness we experience in our online lives. Communication on the Internet has long been a mostly faceless, impersonal exchange, relying on no more than typed words to convey emotions or thoughts. Social media is knitting us back together, by joining our interests and validating our common experiences. The more we share, the closer we become, and social bookmark tools provide the means to bring us closer together than ever.