8.1. Introduction
Social bookmarks make it possible to manage Internet content and classify it according to their usefulness and quality.
Social bookmarks are on-line tools that help locate, tag, store, retrieve and share Internet resources from any device.
Even though the function to synchronize favorite content and reading lists between several devices is already included in most browsers (e.g. Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Edge, Safari), social bookmarks provide additional features, such as sharing these markers and lists with other users and cooperating to maintain them. In this sense, social bookmarking of these on-line services makes it possible to sort and define resources in a collaborative manner, identifying them with key words.
Other functionalities that are available in most social bookmarks include the creation of user groups, internal messages, voting for shared resources or content syndication. Particularly, the content syndication functionality (RSS) makes social bookmarks a very suitable channel for web positioning, as including resources in a category and tagging them will distribute them instantaneously among the users who are subscribed to the corresponding category or tag.
Searching resources through social bookmarks usually yields results that are much more useful than those obtained when using traditional tools, such as search engines. This is mostly due to the fact that contents are not located and classified automatically by machines, but by human beings; the users themselves define whether shared resources are more or less useful and create a ranking by bookmarking the contents they find most useful.