TechCrunch » Simpy

Del.icio.us Competitors Try Paying Users

Michael Arrington — Sat, 28 Jan 2006 10:07:26 +0000

At least two Del.icio.us competitors, Simpy and RawSugar (profiles) have begun paying users to use and promote their services. While the companies have different payment models, both pay based on traffic generated at a particular users page containing the user’s bookmarks.

Simpy

Otis Gospodnetic’s Simpy is allowing users to enter their Google Adsense account number and ads will be shown on their bookmark page. See Otis’ Simpy page for an example.

Simpy is paying 100% of the proceeds from Google to the user for any ads on the page (in fact Google pays the user directly).

Raw Sugar

Raw Sugar is taking a more direct approach – they are paying the top twenty “directories” (user bookmark pages) between $25 and $500 per month. Directories are ranked on raw traffic, and the first payouts were made earlier this month.

RawSugar also plans to pay users a percentage of advertising revenue in a similar way as Simpy.

Is this a gimick to generate attention or is it a viable long term strategy to generate user adoption? Pete Cashmore thinks these promotions should make Yahoo (now owner of del.icio.us) take notice (see his further thoughts in the comments below). Maybe he’s right. And the markets for these products are still in the very early adopter stage.

But it is going to be hard for anyone to overcome the del.icio.us network effect (not to mention Yahoo’s marketing muscle) with relatively small direct economic incentives. I am, however, looking forward to seeing how these promotions drive new user registrations and site traffic. At the end of the day, these companies have nothing to lose with experiments like these.

Update – Simpy (New Features)

Michael Arrington — Fri, 29 Jul 2005 02:02:48 +0000

Company: Simpy

Previous Profiles: July 18, 2005

What’s New?

Simpy is a social bookmarking service that can be compared to Shadows, del.icio.us, Furl, Yahoo My Web 2.0 and others.

Simpy released new features today, including

- full text search of bookmarked sites
- a tag cloud of your bookmarks
- remove, rename, split, and merge tags

From Otis on the Simpy Blog:

“The Release Log has the details, but in short, I am happy to announce that the new Simpy release is out!

The most notable features concern searching and tagging.

The full-text search is back! Not only can you full-text search your own bookmarks, but you can also full-text search any other Simpy user’s public bookmarks. In my opinion, this is big and useful. Browsing by tags is nice, but is also limiting. Full-text search can do more, and since Simpy supports fielded search, you can always emulate tag search with queries like tags:foo (more info is in the FAQ).

You can see your Tag Cloud now (just use the “tags” link in the nav bar at the top of Simpy pages). A Tag Cloud is a more visual representation of your tags and their usage distribution. Along with the Tag Cloud come the 4 new Tag functions: remove, rename, split, and merge. These 4 functions will let you mess with your tags to your heart’s content. If they are not enough, I’m all ears.”

Release Notes are here.

These are useful additional features. I really like seeing data in a tag cloud format for some reason – I’d love it if the RSS aggregators showed new unread content in this format – it would make it much easier to quickly get to the content I want to read.

I also have to say that I was blown away by the Shadows “Shadow Page” idea – simple yet very, very useful, and I would like to see simpy and others consider this idea.

Tags: simpy, delicious, del.icio.us, furl, shadows, socialbookmarking, tags, tagging, folksonomy, techcrunch, web2.0, tagcloud

Profile – Simpy

Michael Arrington — Mon, 18 Jul 2005 10:18:53 +0000

Company: Simpy

Launched: May 4, 2004

What is it?

Simpy is a social bookmarking service that can be compared to del.icio.us, Furl Yahoo My Web 2.0 and others.

In their own words, “Simpy is a social bookmarking service. With Simpy, you can save, tag and search your own bookmarks and notes or browse and search other users’ links and tags. You can be open and share your links with others, or keep them private. Simpy also helps you find like-minded people, discover new and interesting sites, publish your bookmarks, detect and eliminate link-rot, etc.”
Link

Simpy has an excellent user interface and interesting features that the competitors haven’t added. Cool features include full text search of pages (Furl has this as well) and also the ability to find broken links and fix them. We also like the ability to have private, searchable, taggable free text notes on any page. Any bookmark can also be made private. Finally, the ability to add a simpy search box on your blog or other web page (to search your tags) is great.

Core Features:

- Save and Tag pages with a single click using the Simpy Bookmarklet
- Full-text Search bookmarked pages’ content, not just meta-data
- Attach searchable notes to bookmarks
- Choose between private or public bookmarks
- Find people like you and subscribe to their bookmarks
- Share your bookmarks with others
- Detect broken, forgotten and even redirected bookmarks
- Upload your existing bookmarks (Firefox, Mozilla, Netscape, Internet Explorer, Safari, Opera, Galeon and Konqueror supported)
- Export your bookmarks
- Access your bookmarks from any browser and multiple computers
- Save private, taggable, and searchable free-text Notes
- For hackers: Simpy has an open REST API – use it!
- For bloggers: Publish your bookmarks in your blog using RSS or ATOM

We’ve spoken with Otis GospodnetiÄ‡ by email over the last couple of weeks and have been told that Simpy will be releasing new features sometime this week. We look forward to seeing what’s coming!

In general, we find Simpy’s user interface and search capabilities superior to del.icio.us and Furl. We like the interface for adding bookmarks, and ask only that pages can be bookmarked via a popup like del.icio.us (as an option). The optional additional metadata fields are really useful.

Founder:

Otis GospodnetiÄ‡

Relevant Links:

Tools, Search Tools, Blog, FAQ, User Group, About, Steve Mallet, bedeviled mojo shop.

Tags: simpy, delicious, del.icio.us, furl, yahoomyweb2.0, socialbookmarks, socialbookmarking, tags, tagging, folksonomy, rss, techcrunch, web2.0