Yahoo Shutting Down Del.icio.us, Ning’s recent abandonment of its free service, and the end of Bloglines are just the most recent examples of why it seems dangerous to rely on proprietary solutions to the problem of data storage for web-based networking – and of the shared bookmarking aspect in particular.
And even without the question of stability, there is the ongoing problem of duplication and overlap – whether it’s Del.icio.us vs Diigo vs PearlTrees for sharing links, or Facebook vs LinkedIn vs whatever for personal newtorking. For me it seems that the time wasted in trying to decide how to use these things is worth more than all of the benefits they provide.
What I would feel much more comfortable with are open source redundantly distributed solutions which share information in a common format (similar to the design of the web itself) – and which somehow seamlessly blend and extend the contents of the various proprietary systems now in place.
Pipedream?