Social Web Applications And Online Bookmarks

Many people who are introduced to the internet for the first time make a bee-line for social networking sites like Facebook. You aren't anyone who is anything if you haven't got a Facebook or Twitter profile. These sites help you to take advantage of online bookmarks and these are a very powerful means of marketing to.

Although these are not the only social networking sites which make use of online bookmarks, they are two of the recently most popular sites. Facebook began life as a means for students in college to connect and has grown phenomenally. In the beginning it was only young people who used it, but now people of all ages, from all over the world are active users and this is what makes it such a powerful site for sharing information and making money.

Online bookmarks can be used to categorize, organize and rate websites and their value. People who share the same interests are attracted to sites that have been recommended by other like-minded people. Word of mouth in any community has long been considered to be an extremely powerful form of marketing. You only need one bad review and it soon gets around, and the same applies to the good. The magnitude of the internet combined with this makes marketing strategies, nigh unstoppable.

Users often bookmark the sites they have found though other members themselves and pass this information on. They can store the links to the websites for use at a later date, and this is where the term "bookmarking" came from.

Any user is able to obtain their own links or websites storage space for bookmarks, all you have to do is register for this at the social networking site. Bookmarking was first identified many years ago in the early days of the internet, but crashed with the bursting of the dot com bubble. An interest in this was only rekindled again in around 2005, and the rest as they say, is history.

In 2001 when the dot com bubble burst, many of these social networking sites went bust, and the second generation of these started again around 2005. Together with affiliate marketing, the combination of these two tools makes online bookmarking a popular way to market products and services.

These powerful marketing tools have effectively set off a bookmarking revolution on the web. There is no comparison between online social bookmaking and traditional search engines. This is because people organize, rate and rank sites, not a search engine. No matter the complex algorithms used in search engines, they cannot beat the impact humans have.

It is the human touch which makes online bookmarks such a revolutionary marketing tool, the sites are ranked according to the how often they have been used as well as how many times a particular keyword has been used. It is these factors which make bookmarking a powerful social, information sharing and marketing tool.