Monday, December 20, 2010

My initial thoughts on migrating from delicious to yourversion

With all the publicity of Yahoo's Delicious bookmarking service being shutdown, I started looking at alternatives.  There are many so it makes it difficult to decide.  I did some homework and decided to try to use yourversion.  I don't think it is as well known as others but I found only positive references to it on blogs.

Pros:

  • Great user interface
  • Loads fast
  • Searches fast
  • Free
  • Imports your delicious bookmarks in seconds via API
  • Does a great job of focusing attention on what you want to see, hence yourversion of the web.
  • Chrome extension is excellent and ties many social site tools together to your liking,  They have extensions for all the other common browsers too.
  • Android/IPhone/IPad apps
  • Ties news, bookmarks, twitter, video, and blogs into a central location in a very manageable view with a high level of customization possible.
Cons:
  • I see no way to export your bookmarks (have support request in for this)
  • Integration with Safari on Mac is via a bookmarklet and is not as good as chrome but workable.  Extension/addon in works though.
  • No integration with Android HD browser
  • I did not see a way to import bookmarks via a file or other bookmark service.  It only imports bookmarks from Delicious via API.
Summary
It is a good service worth your effort to try.  My biggest concern is just the exporting of your bookmarks.  I will update the blog entry when supports gets back to me.

Update from yourversion support on 12/21
Hi John,

Thanks for your email and your blog post about YourVersion.

Regarding your questions/concerns:
1.  Exporting bookmarks from YourVersion
2.  Integration with the Android HD browser
3.  Help forums

Here are your answers:
1.  Good suggestion -- thank you!  We've added it to our features list.
2.  We do not currently have any integration with the Android HD browser.  We are a very user focused company and we follow the trends that emerge from user requests.  As we hear more people asking for the Android HD browser, we will certainly look further into that integration.
3.  Great suggestion!  We don't have any help forums at this time.  I've also added that to our feature list.

We value your support.  If we can do anything to make your use of YourVersion even better then please let me know any additional questions, comments, feedback, ideas or suggestions.

Thanks again John!

Chris

YourVersion Support

3 comments:

  1. I just signed up, and so far here's what I'm missing from delicious:
    - A counter on each link showing how many other users have bookmarked it (not really important, just neat to see)
    - Non-AJAXy, SEO-friendly links to tag categories and stuff
    - RSS feeds for tag pages
    - Bookmarklets rather than a full-fledged toolbar for bookmarking sites

    More to come, I'm sure.

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  2. You raise good points. I also would like to have a search facility on the discover tab. To search you have to add an interest. John

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  3. After toying with it for a bit, I decided it wasn't really what I needed. I didn't need something to show me new stuff in categories that interest me, sort of similar to StumbleUpon -- I just needed a Delicious replacement -- so I went with Diigo, which does that and adds some cool, useful features like full or partial page screenshots, annotation (public or private), highlighting, and more.

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