Is Social Bookmarking a Growing Or Fading Trend?

Social bookmarking websites were once pegged as the next best thing in social sharing and the spreading of online information from person to person. For those who are unaware or have never used a social bookmarking site, here’s how it works:

When an Internet user finds an article, story, picture, video or blog post that they really like and want to share, all they have to do is enter the link and information into whatever social bookmarking system that they prefer. Of course the user has to sign up for an account with a bookmarking site first, but that only takes a few minutes and it’s completely free to do.

Once the user shares information, other people who belong to the same service can see the information. If enough of the same people share the same link multiple times, then that link can be pushed up to the top of the social bookmarking service’s listings. The higher up the link, the more exposure it gets and the more traffic that the originating website that published the story, photo or video will receive. This is why many blogs and other types of websites will include “share” buttons so that readers or users of their site can easily bookmark the article, picture or video on their favorite social site.

Social bookmarking was a big trend for awhile, but what about now? Is it a growing or fading trend? At this point in time, the social bookmarking trend is fading out quite quickly. Services that are already in existence are seeing a drop in the number of people who use their service and new bookmarking websites are failing to take off or catch on with Internet users.

Why is this happening?

It could be related to how successful other social media websites are doing and how comprehensive other social media sites have become. For example, Facebook has added more options and ways to share and Twitter is becoming more popular as time goes by. With the number of people using Facebook and Twitter, it doesn’t leave too many other people left to use other sites and services on a relatively frequent basis.

Another reason why the social bookmarking trend is fading away is because the services are either not keeping up with the newest technology and website tools or they are changing their formats and Internet users are not liking the changes. Either way, it looks as though social networking is taking away from the once positive benefits of social bookmarking.