SubscribeIn-depth review of Baidu Bookmark service
After living with a slow network for a month, I realized that two services are the most important to me: search and bookmark. One for discovering new things, the other for remembering what I have found. I have finished my one month Baidu Bookmark testing, so I would like to share some thoughts.
What it does right
- Full text search is great and will bring the company a standing foot in social search field going forward. Although this is not invented by Baidu, Simpy is a great bookmark service supporting full text search for example, but only search company can take off in this approach because people just want to search in one place.
- It’s clean and fast. This is rarely seen in Chinese services. Should social bookmarking services promote content on homepage? When a new service launched, before it gained enough high quality users to filter out really great content, it had better not, because a homepage full of garbage content just equals to pushing away new comers. Some reader left comment under our original post when it launched in Nov. last year, asking about the sensitive content question. Without promoting content on homepage, the service effectively protect itself, and this greatly distracting spammers too.
- It provides a great Firefox extension. It’s just not anything worse than the one provided by Del.icio.us in my opinion. It has two nice buttons on toolbar of the browser. And it also has my favorite feature, tag the link thought right click context menu.
What it needs to improve
Public sharing lacks of a feeds. Although people can follow a person’s public bookmark thought a personal URL, but a feeds will make it a lot more useful, such like to syndicate content on people’s own blog.I have made a mistake, it does have a feeds.- Folder name unsearchable. How come I doesn’t get links from my Microsoft folder just because the article doesn’t include the word Microsoft? And yes, Baidu bookmark goes a folder approach, they are not tags. The amount of folder has limits. So I use them as tags for a month and I have already reached the limit of folder count. Without a unique URL to show all links in one folder, you just have to scroll down again and again if you have a lot of folders, and you still have to catch them with your own eyes. You can use search on page, but it’s just bad user experience.
- One more unnecessary click after user bookmarks a link. Can it just go away like Del.icio.us?
- Login session expires too quickly. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. If you would like to use this service, prepare to type your username and password again and again during the day. Probably Baidu thinks Chinese people use computers in Net cafe, and they often forget to logoff their account. But this will change and is changing.
Conclusion
Baidu’s Bookmark service is a great product so far. It provides fast and simple service, but well enough for a personal application. With the integration of other Baidu services, it has become one of the best choices for Chinese people.
You probably think it doesn’t look like social enough. For example, it doesn’t promote top users or most frequently used tags folders. But in fact, I have been a long time Del.icio.us user, and I rarely use the social feature in the past year. Most of the time, I just use it as if only myself am using this service. For companies that are developing social service, please ask one question to yourself, is our service still useful without all the social features? If the answer is Yes, you are on the right way.
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China Web Research
“Public sharing lacks of a feeds.”
It seems that baidu provide this feature.
For example, you can visit my site:
http://cang.baidu.com/workstar,
and a RSS button is on the right side of the webpage.
Actually Tencent just started public beta testing for their social bookmarking service. While we don’t support full-text search yet, all other main features are there already. We’ll focus a little bit more on the social nature of QQ Shuqian (Chinese pingyin for bookmark).
In my opinion, concepts like social bookmarking and tags still needs tons of user education in China. We’ll try to bring these new concepts to a broader user base here at Tencent.
http://shuqian.qq.com
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