Blue Dot is a new social bookmarking site

I’m a regular user of del.icio.us. I use it to bookmark postings for later reference and to share these with others.

At first glance, Blue Dot seems to offer a useful improvement over del.icio.us.

Users can add a note to an item that they save. This small enhancement would be most useful to researchers and team workers, enabling them to add information regarding their thoughts about the item, to place it in a larger context, or even to draw attention to specific content in an article.

One area in which Blue Dot could be improved is sharing. Blue Dot enables users to share their items selectively – making items available only to themselves, to everyone, or only to the people who the user designates as “friends.” However, most people have different circles of friends who cluster around different interests (e.g. work friends, family, baseball league). Blue Dot would be even more useful if it recognized this and enabled a user to designate different subgroups of friends who would share in different Dots reflecting the focus of their “friendship circle.”

UPDATE: Oops. After playing around with Blue Dot some more and adding some friends, I discovered that I can indeed create different lists of Friends that can either be private – seen only by me and the members – of public. There’s a lot more to this service. I plan to use it alongside del.icio.us for the next while to compare the two sites.

Thanks to Robert Scoble for having pointed to Blue Dot.