On Web 2.0, there are hundreds of ways to bookmark.

Just about everyone who uses the Web has at least a few URLs they need to save or need to be able to access quickly -- it's a very basic need, and has been since the very beginning of the WWW. Indeed, bookmarking has been a feature offered within the browser for a very long time. For just as long, however, people have been saving URLs in notebooks, in documents, and in link collections on the Web. Social bookmarking and other online bookmarking solutions have grown at a rapid pace over the past few years, but nonetheless many people still use their browser's bookmarking utility whenever they want to save something or go to a favorite destination on the Web. What is the future of bookmarking, then? Will there continue to be many online bookmarking sites? Will old-fashioned methods of bookmarking still continue to find widespread use?

I don't think browser-based bookmarking is in any danger. (I'm afraid my term "browser-based bookmarking" might be confusing -- the idea is that the bookmarks are stored on the local computer or local home/work network rather than on the external Internet.) It doesn't go without saying that a person would want to share his or her bookmarks with the general public, so social bookmarking isn't something that will appeal to everyone. Indeed, I doubt it is very wise to let everyone on the Internet know who you bank with and have credit cards with, so some bookmarks really are better kept private. You can still keep your bookmarks accessible only to you while still using web-based services, but it is more intuitive to store private data locally. Saving copies of your local bookmarks collection is also simple and straightforward. Additionally, browser-based bookmarking has the advantage of widespread acceptance; people whose bookmarking needs are already met inside the browser may not want to learn new interfaces and use new features even if they are really cool. I expect the browsers will continue to add features to their own bookmarking utilities to keep up with the online innovators as well.
Clutter-averse individuals may particularly try to avoid online bookmarking because of the browser add-ons/toolbars that bookmarking sites tend to encourage their users to download, though often the download is optional. The biggest advantage of online bookmarks, however, cannot be matched on the browser side of things: only online bookmarking can free bookmarks from a particular computer or particular home/work network. Still, plenty of people only surf the Internet at home or work on the same computers every day; what might be vital for the traveler and the college student isn't so necessary for others.

With that said, I am sure that online bookmarking is here to stay and I expect there will continue to be many competitors in this space who will do all sorts of cool things. People like me already use multiple online bookmarking sites as well as browser-based bookmarking -- yeah, bookmark junkies do indeed exist -- and I think that could very well become much more common in the future. I use all my bookmark collections a little differently. My Firefox bookmarks are a dozen or so sites that I use often and extensively; quick access is the name of the game. My Opera bookmarks contain more categorized links than many web directories; I've been building it up since I was a teenager. Indeed, I've even considered using it as a basis for a web directory more than once, but laziness has prevented me from acting on this impulse. It would make a great directory, though...nothing but quality links to very informative sites. On the other hand, the two bookmark collections I maintain on Yahoo! services would make pathetic web directories. On del.icio.us, I primarily bookmark individual blog posts and other "standalone" web content. Appropriately tagged, I can find this miscellaneous material anytime I want via the search utility; a lot of it I may never actually look at again, but that doesn't matter. In fact, I don't think I've ever gone through and purged my del.icio.us bookmarks of dead links -- if I realize something no longer exists then of course I'll remove it, but I never specifically set out to preen my bookmarks there. I do preen my local bookmark collections semi-regularly. Finally, I use Yahoo! Bookmarks to save interesting URLs I find on the Web so that I can figure out what to do with them later. Some bookmarks will be incorporated into a browser-based collection while others will end up on del.icio.us; most of them, though, will probably be looked at more closely and then discarded. So Yahoo! Bookmarks isn't a permanent collection of bookmarks for me; it's sort of the Ellis Island of my bookmarking world. I doubt that my way of doing things is the most efficient nor do I think I get the most out of any of the bookmarking methods I utilize, but I'm nonetheless quite satisfied with my present arrangement. I can't wait to think of new methods of organizing my bookmarks in even more places.

If anything, I suspect this post has shown that bookmarking can be a pretty complicated thing. The beauty is that the tools that are out there for allow us bookmarkers to bookmark how ever we want. You don't need to make it complicated if you don't want it to be; it's all up to you. Want to signup with a bookmarking service just so you can stash away your links to your favorite web games? You can do it while simultaneously keeping all of your serious links on another service or in your browser. Freedom is wonderful.