Delicious remains the most recognisable name in social bookmarking, but does it serve niche markets as ably as specialized tools could? Boca Raton, Florida-based Dwellicious thinks not, and has created a “Delicious for real estate” that it hopes will entice home buyers and real estate agents alike.

Better Than Delicious?

The basics are unchanged: add a bookmarklet to your browser and click it when you see a real estate listing you like, anywhere on the web. Except that unlike generic bookmarking sites, Dwellicious is optimized to work with the following: Century21, Coldwellbanker, Frontdoor.com, Har.com, Homes.com, Realtor.com, Redfin, Remax, Rentals.com, Trulia, Yahoo Real Estate and Zillow. Unlike Delicious, Dwellicious knows where to grab the data from on these pages, and bookmarks all the relevant info with ease.

Here’s the smart bit: Dwellicious bookmarks are dynamic: updated whenever the price of a property changes, or new photos are added, or the property is taken off the market. Use cases might include sharing your favorite property picks with your spouse or real estate agent. And so yes, it’s “better than Delicious” within the real estate niche, but this benefit seems marginal.

Simple Business Model

Dwellicious is not only a simple idea, its planned business model takes little explanation either: the site plans to create Pro accounts for real estate agents, offering advanced tools to help their buyers.

Uncertain Future

It’s a simple, easily explained concept. And yet, the competitive advantage seems slim: unless you’re a real estate agent, generic social bookmarking may suffice…and if I did find a dream home at a bargain price, would I want to share that information or keep it to myself?

In truth, Dwellicious’ future likely lies with the real estate agents themselves: either as a tool to keep track of hundreds of properties at any moment, or as a service to their clients. Even so, the market gap here seems slim at best.

Dwellicious will launch on January 7th 2009 at the Inman Real Estate Connect Conference in New York City.

Further Resources

For more useful real estate tools on the web, see our following resource lists:

REAL ESTATE TOOLBOX: 65+ Real Estate Resources

20+ Tools to Survive the Real Estate Crisis

Reddit’s developers have been busy adding a bunch of new features to the site. One of them is a neat Firefox plugin that brings a lot of Reddit’s functionality directly to the browser. Let’s take a look at what’s available out there if you want to socialize from within Firefox.

Reddit - over the weekend, Reddit launched and tweaked many of its features, most noticeably the layout of subreddits which are now displayed in a thin bar on the top of the page. Other features include a slightly different design for various subreddits and different positioning of the search form.

Furthermore, toolbar lovers will be happy to know that there’s a Firefox extension called Socialite which brings many of Reddit’s features into the browser. Click on a Reddit link, and the toolbar will show up; you can now vote, save, and hide links. If you like, you can open the toolbar manually by clicking on the little Reddit icon in the Firefox address bar; now, you can use it to submit links to Reddit as you browse the Web.

Most other popular social bookmarking sites have some version of a Firefox toolbar, too. Here’s a quick reminder:

Digg - this toolbar gives you access to main features of Digg like submitting new stories and checking out the “best of” selection of stories. It also adds a Google-powered search box to the mix.

Delicious - this plugin is more than just a toolbar; it basically replaces (it’s reversible, don’t worry) your Firefox bookmarking system with that of Delicious. A must have for frequent users of this social bookmarking site.

StumbleUpon - If there’s one social bookmarking toolbar you need to install, get this one. StumbleUpon’s simple concept of stumbling onto popular websites works even better if you do it through a toolbar. If you don’t want to clutter your Firefox, though, you can use the latest StumbleUpon feature: the Web toolbar.

Firevine: This toolbar is no longer a toolbar; the developer of the plugin decided it’s better to integrate everything directly into Firefox. It features an automatically updated watchlist, a seed status checker, context menu and more.

Still need more social stuff for your favorite Web browser? Be sure to check out 15+ social surfing tools for Firefox, as well as 30+ Firefox Tools for Bookmarking & Search.

—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:Be a Digg Rockstar with Social Media Firefox ExtensionSocialMarker Is a One-Stop-Shop Bookmarking SiteSocialPoster Is a One-Stop Bookmarking ToolShareaholic Upgrade Supports Firefox3, Adds More SitesFirefox 2 Security Fixes ReleasedFirefox Campus Edition LaunchesTrailfire Launches Advanced Social Bookmarking Tool

The U.S. might be lagging other countries in broadband penetration and speeds, but we are slowly catching up. AT&T is announcing today that its fiber-to-the-curb/fiber-to-the-home broadband service U-verse is increasing its maximum download speeds from 10 Mbps to 18 Mbps. (Upload speeds are 1.5 Mbps). The cost will be about $65 a month, or can be bundled with TV and voice plans for more.

U-verse has 782,000 subscribers nationwide in 15 markets, and AT&T is expecting to expand that to one million subs in 22 markets by the end of the year. Source:TechCrunch

Delicious, the social bookmarking site that was largely responsible for making ‘tagging’ one of the defining elements in today’s web, has turned 5. The site launched back in 2003 and was one of the first companies to be profiled on TechCrunch. In December 2005 the site had its big payday when it was acquired by Yahoo, and has racked up 5.3 million users since launch.

Company Name

Faviki

20-word Description

Faviki is a semantic bookmarking tool which allows people to organize bookmarks using Wikipedia concepts as tags.

CEO’s Pitch

Faviki is a tool that brings together social bookmarking and Wikipedia. It allows you to tag webpages with Wikipedia concepts, categorizing them automatically. This solves the problem of having different tags for the same concept and makes your tags better organized. Faviki is powered by DBpedia, which extracts structured information from Wikipedia. It also uses the Zemanta API for automatic tag suggestions, and mashes it with Google AJAX Language API to make multilingual semantic tagging possible. There are currently 5.6 million tags you can choose from - 2.7 million English and 2.9 million tags from 13 other languages.

Mashable’s Take

The main aspects of the Faviki utility have already been written out by the company’s founder, Vuk Milicic. So rather than get deep into detail about the Zemanta and Google AJAX Language APIs, let’s explore what Faviki can be to the average user as the social bookmarking tool it is designed to be.

The connection made between bookmarking and Wikipedia might be lost on some, and perhaps a bit purposeless for the diverse number of reasons people interact with websites and their individual pages. Not all subjects have ample representation within Wikipedia. But the suggestions made via the tags provided through Faviki can be helpful at times. And users can always add their own tags if need be. As with most bookmarking services, it can keep your list of bookmarks better sorted for future reference if you’re collecting items to group closely together. And the ability to share links with friends and view topics that Faviki finds applicable to one or more bookmarks is an intelligent way to manage information.

Much of its effectiveness of course depends on how extensively you use the service. The quick transfers of a bookmarklet in your browser’s standard toolbar facilitates the process considerably. Plugin installations in Firefox, for instance, can be a hurdle some don’t wish to jump past. With Faviki, you don’t have to.

Another great item in Faviki’s arsenal is the ability to present notes along with a bookmark. Tagging is a useful search feature, for sure. No question about that. But to have the option to tell friends or the entire membership at large what it is exactly you’ve bookmarked or why you’ve chosen to share it can bring a superb level of guidance into the system.

Sign-up is as easy as you’d like it to be. Enter an email address, choose an account name and password choice, plus a language specification (15 in all), and you’re set. If you’d like to make a change to your username, time zone, or determine whether or not you want to be sent a newsletter, you can do so simply by clicking the ‘edit profile’ setting in the top right section of the page.

Is Faviki a smarter engine than, say, the newly revised Delicious? I have no reservations in thinking that many won’t convert, if only for the very sensible reason that they’re already well-invested and attuned to the ways of the sector’s benchmark. Others will enjoy this beta more than the Yahoo-owned favorite, though. If you’re willing to try something different, or have never fallen under the Delicious spell, Faviki is quite good. Simple and powerful are two elements it exhibits, and the smart design can grow on the user rather quickly. Altogether, Faviki is impressive. For a social bookmarking service, that’s certainly saying a lot.

Editor’s Note: This post is part of an ongoing series at Mashable - The Startup Review, Sponsored by Sun Microsystems Startup Essentials. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

Sponsored By: Sun Startup Essentials

Tonight is the first ever Mashable Monthly SF with Pete Cashmore and the Mashers, the blogger lounge and San Francisco’s tech crowd. Are you like me and can’t make the event? No problem. Check out the live stream from our video partner Stickam. They’re conducting interviews throughout the night and reporting on the happenings at the event.

Mashable Monthly Sponsors:

‘Momentum Design Lab is a premier full-service user experience design firm that specializes in effective user interface design for a wide range of platforms: enterprise applications, Saas, social networks and online communities.’

‘Kazowie creates a unique social shopping experience. Users can easily create personalized gift registries, wishlists, buyer’s guides, and polls and share them with friends, family and like-minded people.’

—Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:Qik Mobile Live Streaming Straight to Mashable Events PagesSwarmcast Moves Into Live StreamingMadonna Concert Live on MSNMashable Monthly San FranciscoAnnouncing Mashable’s Monthly San Francisco (Call for Sponsors)Mashable’s WordCamp Man-CrushWindows Live Spaces Takes on Evite

Source:Mashable!

Microsoft is ready to dive into the social bookmarking arena. After previewing a version of its own Delicious competitor back in May, the company is now set to launch Microsoft Social Bookmarks next month, an effort that will initially focus on techies by offering versions of the site on MSDN, TechNet, and Expression.

The site has been in testing with what evangelist John Martin calls “thousands of technical professionals,” and the results so far speak for themselves, as the popular tags on Social Bookmarks include topics like .net, SQL, and visual basic.

In preparation for the official launch, the site is adding a few features, like the ability to subscribe to tags via RSS, import your bookmarks from other services, and a widget so bloggers can offer their readers a way to bookmark articles to Microsoft Social Bookmarks. These build on top of very basic existing bookmarking features that include a browser bookmarklet that saves web pages to your account.

While none of these features make Microsoft’s product stand out from the competition, it could potentially have appeal to certain Digg, Delicious, and Reddit users who yearn for the days when those sites featured almost exclusively tech news and links. And by rolling it out to users of Microsoft’s popular tech sites first, they are likely to be able to seed the site with the type of content that developers crave. A preview of the site is available here.

—Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:Microsoft Jumping Into Social BookmarkingFungow - Social Bookmarking RebootedLookLater - Instant Searchable BookmarksHYPERiGo Offers Inefficient (and Non-Social) Bookmarking SiteMultiply to Announce Social Bookmarking ToolJigJak Doesn’t Do JackMicrosoft’s Financial MySpace

I lept right into social bookmarking early on. At first is was not only a place to store your bookmarks, but to tag them for easier searching. The old browser based bookmarks took time to organize and sort. Tagging was a natural progression to me. Assigning keywords to links I needed to save made perfect sense.

The vision was then born that if I am centrally storing my bookmarks, why not share them with whomever wanted to watch. I am not sure who really cared what I bookmarked, but it seemed like a good plan.

I soon found that for each site I sent to the bookmarking service, I was told numerous other people, or maybe just a handful, had done the same. The quest to find others with similar interests through the same bookmarks was born. Now we sit where the term ‘delicious’ was made ‘aggressive’ as people bookmarked sites not to study and refer to them, but to be the top ranked. It has been the downfall of social bookmarking ever since.

Let me be blunt. Social bookmarking does have a few values in my eyes. Past that, it moves quickly into wasted time.

Value:

-Compiling sets of links for a project.

-Storing, sorting and organizing my own personal bookmarks.

-Outputting a stream of links used to build a paper, presentation, podcast or blog posting.

-Utilizing tags to quickly look at filtered information.

Waste:

-The need to bookmark everything I visit. I could have just as easily sat there and watched you browse the Web all day.

-Visiting the most popular page on social bookmarking sites. This becomes the game where if they save it, I should too.

-Uploading every bookmark I have ever made since I was 12. This is called

oversharing, learn that word.

-Finding out that people do not understand tagging.

Today there are literally hundreds of personal social bookmarking sites in use. Searching through Google reminds me I never know how they all stay in existence or get found in the first place.

However, here is where the dynamic changes. The new shift in social software brings enterprises in the fold by offering the same social bookmarking abilities to companies. Software provided by IBM/Lotus, Microsoft and a growing list of others are fighting to bring taxonomy order to how users spend their time on the Internet while at work.

So let me ask you the first question. Does the fact that someone bookmarks a site begin to make them an expert in that topic? That is the approach we take when subscribing, following or searching against others bookmarks. I know just as much about medieval egg rolling competitions as the next person. But if I start tagging and bookmarking sites that pertain to the topic, I suddenly have followers and become a leader of knowledge in that taxonomy area.

The real question begs: Are all these shared and tagged bookmarks becoming a useful tool to anyone?

Have we moved beyond the ability to search the Web for ourselves to find information, relying on others to find everything? Do companies have that many people surfing the Web all day, including Intranets, that we need to capture their surfing habits? Or are we entering what I fear most– bookmarking and tagging as much as possible to become popular. When articles are being written on how to get yourself listed on the page that provides the most popular bookmarks on Del.icio.us we have entered into a popularity contest.

The race on every type of social network, bookmarking or not, to be one of the most popular has become time consuming not only for the person involved. Bring this feature into a corporation and you begin to see a loss of productivity. Being known as a top linker, Twitterer, community member or news article junkie is too much to pass up.

If only 20% of your organization posts to social bookmarking services on a daily basis, what is the total time they spent online surfing the Web to get those links? In their eyes they are betting that someone that might someday search on that particular tag, moving them up some magical social ladder. From there multiply the time they spent finding the link by the other 80% of the employees that spend their time browsing links for cool and new items. If the users are not taught the value in providing and finding links, it becomes a social station wagon crammed with stuff that you will never need or find again until you sell off the car.

So what data actually sits out in the social bookmarking sites? Some of it is quite useful if you are working on a specific topic and it is tagged properly. But then your Google or Yahoo search (not a Cuil search for now) would return almost the same results wouldn’t it? How does the social bookmarking site differ? I can drill into a tag, presuming it is done properly and find information quickly that has been filtered. Tagging is an art; a skill; and a dream. No one really gets trained in tagging and most companies never build a starter taxonomy kit properly. You end up with random misspellings, abbreviations and merged or underscored word sets everywhere.

In writing this article, which I hope you socially bookmark, my research uncovered a new problem. Spammers are finding that tagging and bookmarking their sites are raising them in the search rankings. For example, Yahoo started including bookmarks in search results. This causes my short list of value in social bookmarking to shrink. I can no longer trust social bookmarking links from just anyone. It has to be a person that I know or have met for me to follow their links. I can no longer open my browser to the possibility of viruses and junk. I am back to square one in finding my own good links.

But I trust you faithful reader. I do. So bookmark this, share the knowledge and for gosh sakes tag it properly.

Chris Miller is the blogger behind TheSocialNetworker and the podcast TheSocialGeeks. He is an avid social media consumer, which leads to his apparent enthusiasm to write and podcast site reviews. As well his his own opinion. You can find Chris on all the social networks as IdoNotes, including Twitter.

—Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:SocialPoster Is a One-Stop Bookmarking ToolBe a Digg Rockstar with Social Media Firefox ExtensionSocialMarker Is a One-Stop-Shop Bookmarking SiteCoRank’s Latest Version: Create Your own DiggMa.gnolia - Because You Really Need Another Social Bookmarking SiteNsyght Adds Delicious Imports to Social SearchSpinSpy - Social Bookmarking with Spin