I’m on an informatics kick lately. I’m working on a new PIM system that I’ll proably blog about soon but I’ve also been thinking about bookmarking. I am a compulsive bookmarker. I save almost everything. And most of the time I save it more than once depending on what it is because there’s not a single bookmark service that provides everything that I need. So I’m going to ask for one today!

If you’re a developer out there that wants an idea to work on to build the better bookmarking site, this post is for you!! If you’re a bookmarking service user like me, and you have suggestions for features that I didn’t ask for, please leave a comment! Hopefully someone will take a hint and build the ulitimate bookmark service and everyone will be so happy that all the world’s problems will be solved and we’ll live in peace forever after. Well, maybe not. But a better service would be nice.

The Basics

Listed to avoid forgetting the obvious, these are features/abilities that already exist in many if not all of the services out there right now.

• Save a URL with a title and description (duh!)
• Tags may be associated with the bookmark (hierarcy is dead!)
• A page listing all my bookmarks in archive
• Filter my own archive by my tags
• Search my bookmarks by description text and tags
• A page that ranks bookmarks by popularity
• A page that lists the latest public bookmarks
• Subscribe to my archive by RSS

The Not-So-Basics

These are abilities and features that are either not as common, or that I’ve seen in some services but not others. Here’s where some differentiation begins.

• Store private bookmarks
• Store a copy of the page privately so that if the site goes away you have a personal copy of the info
• Store parts of a page instead of or as a supplement to the whole page: to clip parts of a page
• When saving a bookmark, choose whether to store a copy, the clip, just the url or any combination of the three.
• Store optional keywords. These differ from tags in that they have words or phrases that are specific to that single bookmark to help you find it later. If you’re a tagger and you have hundreds of tags that you’ve only used 1 or 2 times, those are really keywords. Having keywords would help us unclutter our tag clouds. Tags are for generalization and classification, keywords are for uniqueness.
• The save post page should have an easy alternative to typing for me to be able to add tags to my post, a suggestion feature maybe, clickable tag list
• Search on text in your saved copies (full text search of the bookmarks, in other words)
• Limit the scope on your searches to entire user base, just personal, and search “within” a tag
• A public API to write programs to manipulate my archive
• Subscribe by RSS to any and all bookmark lists (mine, tag filter, searches, popular, latest, etc).
• A way to easily “copy” a bookmark on any page of the service site to my own archive
• A page with “suggested” bookmarks based on bookmarks that I already have that people who bookmark the same things as me have bookmarked that I haven’t
• A page with a list users who bookmark a lot of the same things that I do as a suggestion to subscribe to them because we have common interests
• Export my archive in an XML format that contains ALL the data that is in my archive
• Export my saved pages in a zipped format
• Sort my archive listing by Date or Title (alpha), or by the domain of the url.
• Create “groups” of users to share/suggest bookmarks with
• Subscribe to another user’s bookmarks
• Subscribe to tags
• View a bookmark’s history (other subscribers and their comments)
• Other users may comment on my bookmarks
• View all comments and descriptions for a bookmark/url (mine and other people’s) on one page
• Create topic lists/directories of bookmarks that others can add to and comment on. Different from groups of users…
• Rate my bookmarks

The Killer Features

Here’s where your new service will stand out from the pack (and it’s a large pack!)… These features are either rare or I have never seen anywhere. Offer these and you will have the edge on all the other services out there.

• Storing copies of the IMAGES from a bookmarked page! This is my number 1, absolute need to have requirement for a bookmarking service that I have only seen one place offer and it was a personal storage site, not a bookmarking service. Services that currently store copies of pages only store the HTML. I NEED THIS!! There’s no other way to preserve picture tutorials and inspirational website design type pages.
• When storing a bookmark to the first page in a series, a way to easily associate the rest of the pages in that series with the original bookmark (instead of necessarily creating a new bookmark for each page in the series). Saved copies should include the whole series, and the link should only show up once listed in my archive even though it points to multiple pages
• Enter markup into the description field: to be able to add links and lists in HTML format to the description
• Search by root url. If you want to see all the links you have for cnn.com, for example.
• A page for a bookmark to view my rating, the average rating of the same url for the people in my user groups, and the average rating of all ratings for the same url across the entire user base
• Create personal notes. This would just be a convenience, basically a bookmark post without a url, but something you can add a title and tags to.
• Create a native post automatically on my blog with the items that I have bookmarked that day
• Create a native post on my blog for every bookmark I save with a tag that I specify (allowing me to choose what items get posted to my blog instead of just the full day’s posting)
• Filter my bookmarks with tag queries (AND/OR/NOT/Like)
• Choose what delimiter I want to use when typing in tags: if I like space delimiters, or commas or semi colons, or whatever… or just have the UI be smart enough to parse them however I enter them as long as I am consistent with what I use
• Meta tag my tags. I want to be able to set up tags to be for source, object type, for, action, etc. Not sure how to do this easily, but it’s my wishlist so I can ask for it anyway
• Allow linking to files and resources other than web files, such as files on my computer, so that I can add descriptions and tags to these files and find them easily (these bookmarks would automatically be private since they’d only work if you were on that computer)

Anyone got any other great ideas? I’ll update this list as people suggest things that I like! And if someone out there decides to build this PLEASE, for goodness sake, let me be an alpha/beta tester!!