Bookmark Organization

Typical bookmark collection tools provide us with limited organization capabilities, especially as the number of bookmarks increases.  Studies have shown that people spend a disproportionate amount of time organizing and maintaining a bookmarks collection (see Abrahms under Related Work for a great in-depth bookmark usage study).  All organization and labeling must be done manually and repetively each time a new URL is added to the collection.  Additionally, the collection tool provides little help in easily resorting the collection without undoing a lot of user effort.  Sorting methods are often non-intuitive and their behavior is not easily predicted.  What is needed is a better, interactive user interface to help an individual quickly locate URLs of interest as well as provide support for managing and organizing the URLs.
 

Group Bookmark Collections

Bookmark collections are largely individual collections and maintained by only one person.  But we are increasingly seeing the need for group URL repositories that allow multiple people within the same social group (work, family, and/or friends) to contribute to the collection.  Because there is a lack of support for this type of collaborative activity, people have resorted to forming web pages that serve as URL repositories.  But the overhead in creating and maintaining such a collection remains very high.  We see a need for a user interface that smoothly merges individual bookmark collections into group collections.
 

Sharing URLs with Friends

Humans like sharing funny or interesting information with one another, and the same is true when it comes to sharing URLs.  But the methods we employ to share this information can become a convoluted process, either by having to explain how to get to the URL or having to cut & paste the URL into emails and web browsers.  Imagine having a point-and-click interface that allows you to grab the current URL in your web browser and provides a lightweight notification to your friends.
 

Searching Capabilities

Humans are largely social creatures, and as such we tend to navigate the world around us by picking up cues left by others.  In the digital domain, however, social cues are much less evident or nonexistent altogether.  When we perform a search, for instance, often we are at the mercy of the search engine's ranking algorithms to give us some notion of relevant artifacts returned by the search.  Additionally, we have no idea whether to trust the search results or not.  If we have a group bookmarks collection, however, it makes sense to search the collection first in the hopes that relevant information that we seek may have already been documented by a peer, and hence trusted (or not trusted, depending on the person!).
 

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