Informing the Design of Shared Bookmark Systems

Bookmark systems are now recognised as a practical mean that allow users to land mark interesting sites in the huge information space that constitute the World Wide Web. In this paper we argue that, by building collaborative bookmark management tools where a group of people can share their experiences and their results in feeding and organising personal bookmark sets, bookmarks can be transformed into effective customized web spaces. In this paper we first present a study of main requirements that a shared bookmark system should meet. Then the design space of such applications is analysed. The set of identified requirements is used to compare and criticise main collaborative shared bookmark systems that are proposed in the literature. Main drawbacks of existing systems are a) the weak customisation of shared spaces, b) the lack of efficient and easy to use privacy protection policies, and c) the adoption of centralised architectures that affects badly responsiveness, availability and dependability of these systems. Based on our analysis of the state of the art we propose a full distributed collaborative bookmark management system, called CoWing, that meets most of the requirements identified in this paper. A special attention is paid to protect the privacy of the system users.