How much room is left for the bookmarking tools market?
Back in the mid-2000s, the once king of social bookmarking Delicious popularized the buzzwords “folksonomy” or “collaborative tagging.” Later, a batch of companies further bettered our knowledge management and content curation with innovative features: Diigo with web annotation, Pocket, Instapaper and Readability on “read it later,” and Evernote with a mission to store our life in a notebook, including organizing our bookmarks. Not to mention that many of us have migrated to Facebook, Renren, Weibo or Twitter for content sharing and discovery.
Now most of these companies share overlapping features such as bookmark sharing, content discovery powered by other social network platforms, text search and multi-platform compatibility.
The sheer amount of bookmarking tools is astounding, but Wtree, a new freemium bookmarking tool, sees that there is still an appetite for bookmark and web history visualization. Founded by Rohan Dsilva from the UK, Wtee allows users to create tree diagrams of their curated websites with the flexibility to rename, catalog and move webpages around. Once users grant permission to Wtree to crawl browser data, the tool displays users’ browsing history in easy-to-read graphs. Users can also share trees with friends while all data transfers are encrypted.
The company is up and running on Kickstarter. Right now the user dashboard is a bit disorienting to me, at least not as user-friendly as it seems in its Kickstarter campaign video. As says in its mission statement: “Wtree allows users to auto-bookmark, organize websites, create tree graphs of them, visualize web history and search results in a very visual and creative way. It’s like dropbox for links.” Wtree seems to focus on too many things simultaneously without pinpointing to its real appeal: interacting with bookmarks through tree diagrams.