Beyond Social Bookmarking

I've been using del.icio.us quite extensively since I first adopted it. It's great to be able to tag sites of interest to me for future reference, and I'm currently working on a FireFox extension that will streamline my workflow with regards to the "toread" tag (which I discussed earlier here). But lately I've been making great use of del.icio.us's "my network" feature, part of which allows me to tag sites for other users in my network. This is a really useful feature because it saves me from having to email people interesting things - they can just get notified on their own terms (when they visit the site, RSS feed, etc.).

In a lot of instances the network capability - simply bookmarking the site for another's attention - is all the functionality I need. But when bookmarking sites for certain friends, I find that we often get into an email discussion of the tagged site. That's slightly awkward because ideally I'd like to keep the bookmark coupled with the conversation. It makes me wonder whether there isn't a need for a social bookmarking service that tracks not just URLs, descriptions, and tags, but also a conversation on the URL.

I know there are some chat products that let people talk in real time if they're visiting the same site. But that's not what I'm after - something that works like del.icio.us would be fine. I'd just like to see the same sort of application allow more dynamic interaction within the bookmark, so that people are not just designating sites of interest and labelling them interesting, but also discuss WHY they're interesting.

What do you think? Does this represent a useful functionality? Has somebody already implemented this?

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Written on Friday, September 01, 2006