Cameron Olthuis

Thanks to Mike for pointing me to BlinkList, a fairly new social bookmarking engine similar to Del.icio.us which I gave a short tutorial on the other day.

I first heard of BlinkList a couple months ago from a TechCrunch review. I took a quick glance and decided I was happy with Del.icio.us and that was that.

Mike, I have to say you have amazing timing. Shortly after you commented on the tutorial Del.icio.us experienced a power failure, the next day they had even more problems which caused some serious down time. During this time I had the opportunity to really get familiar with BlinkList when I might have not otherwise done so.

BlinkList come from a company called MindValley. MindValley has a really solid team so I’m expecting great things from them, BlinkList being one of them. They have super cool stoke and I really like their style, take a look at their website and you’ll see what I’m talking about.

Ok lets get on with the review…

There’s a lot of things I really like about BlinkList and a lot things that I’m not so crazy about, with that being said I’ve been using it almost exclusively for the last week. I guess you could say I like it enough that I’ve converted. However, I still bookmark the really important sites on both, you never know.

Dislikes

The instructions for setting up the bookmarklets are pretty poor for the average joe. I can see a lot of people getting confused on this step and leaving. For example, I didn’t have my bookmarks toolbar active and it needs to be in order to add the bookmarklets. If the average user doesn’t have their bookmark toolbar active they might not be able to figure this out, and I couldn’t find anywhere on the site that gives instructions for this.

I’ve never been a fan of the tag cloud. I much prefer a tree over a tag cloud and I was very happy to see today in the MindValley Blog that they’ve added this to the homepage, I’m still waiting for it to be added to my list though.

I really find it annoying that when you click on a bookmark it opens in a new window. To me this is a very cheesy way of trying to keep people on your site. If I wanted to open a link in a new window I would. I think by now we’ve all figured out how to use the back button. Haven’t we?

I don’t like that fact that you can’t view bookmarks in more than sets of 20, please give me the option see them by the 100’s. It’s a lot easier to see the bookmarks in one page instead of going from page to page.

Likes

I really like the thumbnail previews for certain sites, I haven’t figured out why some sites have the thumbnails and some don’t, maybe they could explain this in their FAQ.

BlinkList also offers the option to make your bookmarks private. I’m not sure I’ll ever need to use this but I’m sure for some people it’ll come in handy.

They’ve really done a nice job with the design & colors, very web 2.0ish. I also really like the “blink” button, it reminds me of Digg. There’s a few layout issues I would change but for the most part I can deal with those. They’ve certainly done a great job of using Ajax, and it’s everywhere.

Overall I really like the direction of BlinkList and I think they’ve got a lot of potential, I can really see BlinkList gaining some major traction and becoming a major player. I still think del.icio.us is a little better for the average person, mostly because it’s easier to use and navigate. For the more technologically advanced user BlinkList is clearly much better.

I look forward to watching BlinkList grow!