Social Bookmarking Review – dzone

  As a software engineer and software architect myself, I find myself constantly trying to find new information on the Internet on best practices, patterns, tools, etc.  I recently started using other social bookmarking tools, but became irritated at the growing number of stories that I felt made no sense, being ranked extremely high.  Certain features such as previewing the page, showing number of clicks vs. the number of votes, displaying “complaints” live for a vote seemed missing (some sites have this, but have a proprietary system that is undisclosed to serve as the banning mechanism for entire domains, which is scary if we are trusting these companies to make news “free” and selected “by the people).

dzone is a great example of social bookmarking done right!  A really nice feature I love is the ability to see a Ajax preview window pop up on each story that is being voted on.  Also, with each story you have the ability to “tag” stories with keywords, similar to tags on blog’s.  This gives users the ability to view upcoming links based on tags!  As an example, someone submitting a story can tag the story with certain keywords, and a voter can then add their own tags to the story.  This gives stories that might not have been tagged properly, or missing certain tags, to be “re-classified” under another section.

Another great feature is the “You might also like” feature.  This lists stories that the user might like, if they liked the current story they are looking at.  Also a “Real Time Spy” allows you to view what users are doing in real time.  This can be anything from stories that are currently being voted on, to what users are clicking, or even commenting on.  The filters are very nice!

I also love that the dzone is tailored to developers.  All of the links are very pertinent to software developers, and the community here has really formed around them.

If you are a software developer, you will absolutely love this site, as it has more functionality than any other social bookmarking site out there.  I hope to see a new version of the site tailored around technology, and then maybe expanding into other areas.  The overall architecture of this site just seems so much more flexible and responsive, vs other sites.

PopUrls.com has recently noticed dzone as well and added them to their list of social bookmarking web sites to display.

Check out the dzone!

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