Clipmarks has been redesigned… again.
While I’m a big fan of Clipmarks, I must admit I rarely use it. Clipmarks is a service which allows you to take clipping of web pages: it’s reviewed by me more in-depth here, here and over at Lifehacker. Their main competitors are Diigo and Google Notebook.
The changes in this redesign of Clipmarks, according to the official blog, are:
- The site is now substantially faster.
- The site now works in Opera, Safari and basically any other browser.
- Everything has been redesigned.
- Better integration of AJAX and non-AJAX functionality. The most apparent advantage is that every clipper page (ex: http://clipmarks.com/clipper/invictus/) and every tag page (ex: http://clipmarks.com/tag/politics/) now displays it’s URL in the browser’s address bar.
- The clip-list in the middle column can now be scrolled up and down using your mouse’s scroll wheel. So can the right side of the page where each clip and its respective comments are displayed.
- By default, all clip-lists are sorted by Latest Pops (except individual clipper pages, which default to being sorted by Newest clips). You’ll see the sorting options at the top of the list (including a link to create your own custom sorting option).
- No more introductory style home page. For now on, its straight to the good stuff.
- The left side of the site now displays 9 main tags, each providing a drop-down menu that displays 5 related tags. You can change any of the 9 tags to whatever interests you.
- You can now see which clips for any tag or by any clipper have gotten the most pops by clicking the Most Pops sorting tab in a tag or clipper-specific page.
- Reddit and Diigo have been added to the list of services that clips can be posted to.
While the site is considerably faster, it still takes a number of setting to download only my 512kbps connection; I wouldn’t like to think about it for a 56k user! The site is pretty graphic intensive, with the use of reasonably large avatars, and images being contained in some clippings.
Frankly, I only use Mozilla Firefox, I can’t test it in other browsers. I’ll take Eric’s word that the site now works in other browsers; however the extension (which is required to clip) only works in Firefox, Flock and IE.
While I think Everything has been redesigned may be a bit of an exaggeration, it is much more streamlined, lighter and has a more Web 2.0 feel to it. It’s come a long way from its ‘not the best colour scheme I’ve seen, it’s a little heavy’, it now feels very light and minimalistic.
As for Ajax: Clipmarks has always had my praise for it’s use of Ajax. I do believe the advantage pointed out in their blog post over the slight change of the system is definately useful. It’s good to have nice, simple, sharable URLs such as http://clipmarks.com/clipper/computerjoe/.
The rest of the changes seem somewhat trivial, with the exception of the last point. It’s quite brave to add support for one of your competitors (Diigo), however, I think this will bring some Diigo users over to Clipmarks.
Tags: clipmarks, web 2.0, web2, web 2, web2.0, diigo, google notebook
Thanks for the review Joe. I’m surprised to hear that the site was slow for you. A great deal of our development efforts were devoted to enhancing its speed.
Your point about diigo is a very interesting one. Quite honestly i have never used diigo, though i think i’m familiar enough with what they do to say that we’re really not trying to compete with them.
Our focus at clipmarks is to create a destination for people get unique, compelling bits of information that others have found on the web. It seems that diigo is more of a personal research tool (but quite honestly, i may be wrong about that). I would say that we see clipmarks being more akin to sites such as digg and reddit, with the distinction that the content contributed to our site is in very small portions.
There are two main reasons thatwe’re focused on small portions. The first is it makes it easier and more enjoyable for people to consume information about many topics in less time. Since we’re info-junkies ourselves, that matters a lot. The second is that it allows interesting content found within web pages to receive a spotlight that isn’t possible when it’s contained within an entire page.
For along time, many people have grouped clipmarks as being similar to diigo and google notebook. I’m hoping that we can change that perception.
I haven’t used it too much lately, as much as I used to, but I do like it. Although yes its not exactly like Google Notebook, there are similarities but I like Clipmarks a lot better of the two. I haven’t used Diigo.
ps (and totally unrelated) Have you tried vox yet? I’d love to hear your comments on it.
Nope, I haven’t used Vox. Frankly, I try to stay away from social networks
(I don’t even have a MySpace account 
)
Looks better, but not as good as I would expect from modern Web 2.0 : now 9rules redesign : that was a redesign, this is just some messing around.
I hate Myspace to the bone. Evil….
I might actually use this, useful when doing school research and Google Notebook is slow.