Sort of like Rollyo for social bookmarks?

Wow, hey, another social bookmarking company with a twist. WHY ARE YOU WRITING ABOUT THESE COMPANIES???

The problem I see with any of these tag-based search engines is that of tag spam. They’re fine in principle if you can trust your users but I’m sure it won’t be long before you find porn and Viagra sites tagged with every topic under the sun and the result quality will go down the pan

Yeah while I understand it’s your thing to report new companies as they come out, the concepts of these companies are getting ridiculous. How many bookmarking sites do people really need? And what makes it so hard for someone like delicious to implement something like this? Apparently they are “Pioneering the intentional web revolution” but I fail to be persuaded.

While Otavo has similarites to successful social bookmarking models it is quite different.

Otavo’s core concept is to organize your information on intentions (we call quests) instead of tags. Tags are used as a secondary organizer.

What’s the difference between Tags and Intentions?

Tags are categories. As categories, a tag does not store HOW or WHY you would use the information tagged, just where it belongs in the grand scheme of things.

Intentions store HOW and WHY you want to use the information.

This allows users to organize information for a specific purpose instead of just filing it like a librarian.

I’m sorry, I’m going to do a David Spade thing here:

I liked it better the first time, when it was called Del.icio.us.

Sorry, you were begging for it, Mikey.

Aw…you commenters are nasty.

Nah, it’s actually more of a social search play than a social bookmarking site. Mike compares it to Wink, which is right on. But the dynamics are different from both del.icio.us and Wink - you start a “quest” and others searching for the same thing can complete your quest. That all gets stored, and delivered to future searchers when they’re looking for the same thing as you. Maybe a cross between Yahoo Answers and Wink.

I’m not convinced by the argument “why couldn’t flickr/delicious/digg do this?”. At the risk of making a bad analogy, did the YouTube guys think: we won’t build our site because Flickr might decide to do the same thing? Of course not! (And the stats show they’re now bigger than Flickr). In fact, I’d argue that Flickr would never have built YouTube, because they don’t relate to the MySpace demographic.

But yeah, while the future of search will probably be social, it will likely come about by combining social bookmarking with search - Yahoo has a good shot. All these social search startups will struggle, simply because the big three have invested so heavily in search.

Wow, it always amazes me how folks just criticize, but don’t bother to offer any constructive recommendations about what to do. Keep up the great work. I know it’s tough to keep it going. I appreciate all the time taken to keep this blog going.

Hey Saul, we all appreciate Michael’s blog; however, don’t forget that it’s the nature of the net to “discuss”. We’re all just being ourselves.

In the few short weeks that I have been privileged to test Otavo, the potential has become obvious. There really is no comparison between Otavo and Del.icio.us. Rather than go into specifics, I will just say that the search results in Otavo are collaborative, and more specific to the actual intentions of your search.

I highly recommend that people at least give at a spin, before poo-pooing it as yet another search engine… it promises to be much more than this.

kmx.. very true. I’m all for discussion, even criticism

And they let you post this? What about the srict no-blogging rules?

Colin, yes, Amanuel, the founder, is ok with this post.

The problem with social networking sites is that the people on them are rarely worth getting to know. Judging by profiles and posts, most people are social retards with no concept of written English.

I think one valuable feature that seems like most bookmarking services have overlooked (or avoided) is the ability to archive linked pages. This seems like it would be even more useful if the links were used for research.

Web-based content usually doesn’t last long and it can be a bit of a pain to dig something up on archive.org (which is a great service nonetheless).