Common Sense for the Biochemist

Keep those e-mails coming! The discussion over social bookmarking seems to be a hot topic right now. Solving the world's (and internet's) problems through blogging is the way to go, well, outside of actually doing something about the world's problems. Thanks to Ben Lund the project manager for Connotea for dropping an e-mail regarding the ongoing discussion over social bookmarking - Part 3, Part 2. I post parts of it (in no particular order) and give my response.

I'm the project manager for Connotea at Nature Publishing Group. I'm always looking for feedback (both good and bad) from users and visitors, so I was interested to read your post about Connotea and CiteULike.

Once again, thanks for the e-mail.

I was also puzzled by your comparison of us to Google. The primary aim of Connotea is for it to be a useful service that enables users to organise their own resources -- the idea of finding or discovering new articles is a secondary, albeit very important, one.

With this remark, I was thinking down the road business-wise. I'll probably ruffle a few feathers here, but I think del.icio.us and CiteULike will eventually get bought out by the likes of Google or Yahoo or another big time web player. This discussion started with my review of MyJeeves, which combines a search function with a bookmarking function. I think this would probably be advantageous for both del.icio.us and CiteULike, as it would give them access to virtually unlimited server power and storage space, not to mention virtually unlimited brain power for improvements. I may be mistaken since I don't know the full business plan for Connotea, but I just don't see it being sold off or eventually having the resources that these other two sites potentially may have access to.

We're still in the stage of constant development on Connotea, and have already altered out plans to take account of user feedback and developments on the wider web, so if you have any ideas about how to make it more useful, feel free to let me know. You mentioned a couple of things in your post: * Difficulty of manually adding a bookmark: 'Add a bookmark' is the first option in the toolbox on the right hand side after you log in. Does the toolbox blend in too much in with the background? Any suggestions for how to make it more prominent? Also, the idea is for users to mostly use the bookmarklets, so they can add links as they're reading them. Do we need to make that more prominent too? * General difficulty in navigation: Is there any chance you can give me a couple of examples of what you were trying to do? Then I can look at the navigation we have right now and work out how best to make it more usable. Again, if you have any suggestions, please let me know.

As soon as you log in you are directed to your homepage, you then have to go to "My library" to view your toolbox options. In the other two cases, you have the option to start adding links or references as soon as you log in (OK that is kind of getting nit-picky but it made an impression on me).

I was intrigued that you contrasted Connotea with CiteULike, since the underlying functionality and concepts of the two are virtually identical. It's true that we emphasise different aspects of the services, but in essence both Connotea and CiteULike are about saving and sharing links online.

A science based social bookmarking site is a good idea and I am sure there will be quite a few people out there who will find your site useful. However in the grand scheme of things, you can not forget del.icio.us in these comparisons, which beats both CiteULike and Connotea hands down because of its simplicity. I don't know how to describe it, but del.icio.us has a very clean, user-friendly interface. The CiteULike interface is just as "busy" as Connotea's (more on that comparison further down). Let's talk speed issues. While I have been writing this post, I have been adding links to both del.icio.us and Connotea. Maybe it is because I am "across the pond", but I have been able to add 2-3 links in del.icio.us to every one in Connotea, and this is simply because I have been waiting for pages to load in Connotea. As stated in a previous post, this is not the first time I have had speed issues with a NPG site. CiteULike is loading maybe a little slower than del.icio.us but not by much. To me, its those little things that can give one site an edge over the other. So I have declared the winner to be del.icio.us, however, there's a catch. With CiteULike, I can store my copy of a PDF version of a reference article on their server and attach that to a bookmarked reference. Therefore no matter where I am I can get access not only to a reference, but to my copy of the actual paper. This is the only reason why I would use CiteULike and its a very good reason. Thanks again for your e-mail, and I hope that I have answered some of your questions. Now about those rising journal subsciption costs. . . As a side note: This string of posts has made me realize how important blogging is regarded by the professional world. It is easy to see what has been said in the blogosphere about a particular subject or thing through a simple search on Technorati or Bloglines. I am impressed by the attention that CSFTB has been garnering lately. Note added in proof: Sorry for the format of the quotes. I am working on that issue.