WoW: Delicious and Pinterest (my favorite things #10-ish)

typography canvas by tenderbeasts on etsy

See my previous favorite things… dafont |  firegestures | babycenter | allrecipes | w3schools | pandora and grooveshark | color scheme designer | swagbucks | amazon mom

Before we get started with my 10th(ish) and final (for now) favorite thing(s), a couple of quick updates on previously mentioned favorite things:

• Pandora has lifted their 40-hour listening limit! Now you can listen as much as you’d like for free! You can still pay the $36 to upgrade to Pandora One so that you can use the desktop application and have fewer ads and timeouts, plus higher quality audio. 
• Effective October 13, 2011 (just the day after I raved about it!), Amazon decreased their Subscribe and Save discounts for new subscriptions. Now the highest discount you can receive (on a new subscription)  is 20% — 15% for being a member of Amazon Mom and 5% for using the Subscribe and Save feature. Bummer.

Okay… on to today’s topic… two of the online services I use most (probably tied with Google and its related services :): Delicious and Pinterest. Both services are considered (at least by me 🙂 online social bookmarking services… Translation: save and share awesome/ugly/interesting things you find out there on the world wide web.

Unless you’ve been hiding under a virtual rock, you can’t have escaped hearing about Pinterest. But just in case you’ve crawled out from under the rock just to read this post (thank you!)… here’s the [shortened] scoop: Pinterest is a virtual pinboard to share and categorize your inspiration. (Read the full spiel here.)

Delicious is more of a traditional bookmarking service where you can save items of interest and share them with specific people or an audience of followers.

I use both. Why? Because both have strengths and weaknesses, so I use them in different ways. Who says I have to be loyal to one bookmarking service? 😉

The biggest draw of Pinterest is that it is visual. When you save a pin, you choose a photo to represent your bookmark. Awesome!

Another huge bonus for Pinterest is that it is incredibly easy to use. Just drag the little bookmarklet to your browser bar, and then all you have to do is click every time you see something pin-worthy.

And, rounding out the trifecta, Pinterest makes it easy to make those bookmarks social. You can easily follow what your friends are pinning and comment on their pins.

In my eyes, the biggest downfall of Pinterest is that your pin can only go on one board. I mean, you can pin it on multiple boards, but then any followers will see that pin multiple times. So where does one put a pin that could go both on your home decor and i can make that pinboards? Conundrum. (And, yes, those links are to my boards, if you want to go check them out 🙂

The versatility to place a bookmark in multiple categories is a huge strength of Delicious. When I save a link in Delicious, I can tag it with many, many tags. So then when I go back to look for something I bookmarked, such as a delicious chicken recipe, I can look at all the links I have saved and tagged as chicken, or dinner, or recipe.

Really, for me, the best-ever bookmarking service would be a combination of the two: Delinterest. No. Pinlicious. Yes, that’s it… Pinlicious! It would be both versatile in tagging/categorizing bookmarks and visual, plus simple to use. But, until this blessed union takes place, I will continue using both services: Pinterest for the things I really love and want to come back and see over and over again, and Delicious for the not-as-visually-interesting things that I still want to save. 

If I were a casual bookmarker, I would probably just choose one service and stick with that. But casual is not my style. I bookmark EVERYTHING. Seriously. If there is a chance that I might ever want to see x or y again, I bookmark it. I’ve been bookmarking for about 3 years now, and I consult my bookmarks first, before I Google. It works almost every time I’m looking for just about anything. 🙂

So, there’s the short version of these two social bookmarking services. Starting next week, we’ll be spending a few weeks talking more about these two and other social bookmarking services, as well as etiquette (am I the only one who can never spell that right?) and… well, what do you want to know? Questions and suggestions are always welcomed and quite encouraged…

PS – Catch up with me on Pinterest here and on Delicious here. Oh, and Debra is on Pinterest, too. See her boards here.

Lu (or Lorene if you prefer) is the mom of two sweet little things (except on the days that they aren’t) and the wife of a singing and dancing elementary teacher. She is the proud author of this weekly Wednesdays on the Web (WotW) segment here on Housewife Eclectic and spends the other days of the week blogging about crafts and whatever else comes up at just Lu.