9 of the Best Alternatives to Delicious

Disclosure: We are a professional review site that receives compensation from the companies whose products we review. We test each product thoroughly and give high marks to only the very best. We are independently owned and the opinions expressed here are our own.

Over the last few days the rumors of Yahoo shutting down / selling Delicious have been around the internet, Twitter, and other social media sites for several days and this has gotten a lot of Delicious users upset or scared that they are about to lose all of their bookmarks.

This is the problem with sharing everything on the cloud, at anytime a service providers can decide to shut down or sell off these services. In most cases, selling off may not be the worst thing for the users, but its still a good idea to back up your books on and offline.

I use Delicious almost daily, but hearing the news didn’t surprise me. The site hasn’t changed all that much and in my opinion, it seems like Yahoo! has not spent that much of an investment (other then buying Delicious out) ion updating and adding more service features. I also notice a large in new bookmarks over the last six or seven months as well. Because of these issues and the lack of features Delicious has compared to their competitors, I started looking for other services while back. When I looked into other bookmarking services, it needed to have the basic features of Delicious but it had to be popular enough and offer syncing with or auto submitting to Delicious. I found several sites that offer this and have been fairly happy with one of them. That site is Zootool. I do not get much traffic from them but it offers to submit my links to several social networks including Delicious. I will go into more into detail later.

After hearing the rumors and since I am a Delicious user having over 500 bookmarks saved, I decided that it was time to back these up and add them to several different places. I found that there are quite a few places you can store your bookmarks and even offer import services from Delicious and syncing to Delicious. I also found several sites that do not offer important services but if your tech savvy their are scripting tools you can use to automatically import to those services.

Today, I wanted to share with you some great alternatives to Delicious. Several of the sites will be for new bookmarking services or you can use it as a way to get more backlinks for your blog content.

1. Zootool

Zootool is a creative way to visually bookmark websites, images, videos and share them on different networks. The site is about two yeas old and does not have a lot users yet. Earlier this week, they turned off the Delicious cap. You can now import your full list of bookmarks from delicious! Currently their is a forty-eight hour warning for importing form Delicious. It took several hours to import 500 bookmarks. But as more people start importing it may take longer. Its easy to import bookmarks from Delicious. All you have to do is export your bookmarks on Delicious, then go into Zootool >>> Settings >>> Sync >>> Choose File >>> Start Import.

Once you get them imported, then you can add the bookmarking tools to your browser of choice. Then as you add new content to your profile you submit them to delicious as well.

Follow me on Zootool.

2. Diigo

Diigo is more than just a bookmarking site. They consider themselves a personal research tool, collaborative research platform and social community content site. Diigo has a bunch of cool features, you cache a page (save the page) so even if the site removes the content its still there. You can high light snippets of text and leave sticky notes on those pages for future reading. Another cool feature is screen capture and add notes to it. For a better experience, they do offer a premium service.

Its real simple to import from Delicious. All you have to do is export from Delicious then go into tool (Diigo) >>> on the left column click on Import from Delicious >>> Choose File >>> add optional tags >>> Import Now. Do to everyone wanting to import their bookmarks, it can take several ours to import a large collection of bookmarks.

Follow me on Diigo.

If you want to know more about Diigo and its features check out this video about Diigo.

Diigo V5: Collect and Highlight, Then Remember! from diigobuzz on Vimeo.

3. Mister Wong

Miser Wong is a European social bookmarking site that has been around almost as long as Delicious. You can use Mister Wong to save your favorite websites and it even syncs with Delicious.  I not all that happy with design and the navigation of the site. I am still trying to get a feel for the site how everything works. I do like the site and see the potential of it. I just need to figure how to use it effectively. I do like fact that it puts your profile at the top of the page with links back to your site (having some issues with this). On the bookmarks page, you get your profile and backlink at the top. Then your bookmarks start. You even get a snapshot of the saved page.

Importing your bookmarks from Delicious is easy, all you have to do is export from Delicious then go into Mister Wong >>> click on Profile >>> Under Import / Export >>> click Browser Bookmark Import >>> Under Del.icio.us bookmark import >>> Choose File >>> Start Import. This can take some time, they will email when your import is complete. You can also choose to use the Delicious Bookmark Sync option to sync everything up. I had some issues with this and found it worked better to import everything setup syncing after everything is in place.

Follow me on Mister Wong.

4. Trunk.ly

Trunk.ly is a new service still in the testing phase. Its so new that they are still adding features such as support links, and the option to delete links / accounts, and even change your profile email address. Trunk.ly is a great service, I wouldn’t say its a bookmarking site like Delicious but it does save all your links. Currently you can sync Trunk.ly account, with your Twitter account, and it will grab every link you ever shared on there and put them in order from oldest to newest. You can even import your Delicious account as well.

To import your Delicious bookmarks go export your bookmarks from Delicious then in Trunk.ly go to the Delicious Importer >>> Enter your Delicious Username >>> Choose File >>> Upoad

5. Evernote

Evernote is another great service for bookmarking, but do even more than just bookmarking. There goal is to give their users the ability to easily capture any moment, idea, inspiration, or experience whenever they want. You can create text and ink notes, snapshots of whiteboards and wine labels, and clip web pages. They offer so much, but at the free level there isn’t that much you can do and what you can do is limited. If you need this type of service then go for it. From what I can tell with Evernote, they do not offer a way to import bookmarks from Delicious. This service would be good for someone wanting to start fresh and needs a whole lot more services than just bookmarking.

6. Pinboard

Pinboard another alternative to Delicious. It a newer site and looks a lot like Delicious. You can import from Delicious but costs $8.95 to use their service.

7. Histrio.us

Histrio.us is a simple bookmarking service that offers an easy migration process from Delicous, full text search, read later, and page snapshots.  The free version is very limited and you can only “historified” 300 sites.

8. Google Bookmarks

Google Bookmarks has been around for a while. Its a basic bookmark service you can share with everyone. Its plain, simple, and very easy to use. Install the Google Toolbar and its even easier to use. However, they do not offer an import service for Delicious. If you wanted to, you could go into Delicious and export to browser and then use the toolbar to save them over to bookmark. I will have to look into this. But for those that have hundreds of bookmarks, this is not going to be easy and I believe you will loose your tags as well.

9. Faves

Fave’s have been around almost as long as Delicious and has gone through at least one revamp that I know of. Its still a small community and does not offer a Delicious importer and since the site isn’t all that popular anymore, most new to the social bookmarking scene may pass it by or ignore all together. The site itself has a nice layout that works, but the navigation wasn’t the greatest. From what I read they are continuing to work on the site so maybe in the near future this site might make a come back.

Final Thoughts

All of these are great places to store your bookmarks. After testing I found three sites that like most but I want to wait on giving that answer. I plan to test these sites for a while to see if they work out or not. I will not be testing the premium sites. I believe with the free sites that offer the same features as the premium ones for free is a better way to go. Why pay for a service when another company is doing for free and they have been around longer, and its more popular.

Another issue I came across, is that not all the sites share with each other. So that means I have to install their booklet or toolbar save each bookmark more than once. But some of them do sync back with Delicious. It would be great to be able to save bookmarks to one site and it auto post them to the rest of the sites that I use. That way, not only do I get the extra backlinks and traffic from these sites, but my bookmarks are backed up in several different places.

As mentioned before, I will be running some long term testing on the free sites and the premium sites with the good free options to see what services work the best and let everyone know which are my favorites. So stayed tuned.

I also have several ideas on how I will go about auto posting the bookmarks to the sites at one time. But until I know it works, I will keep that to myself…