I have always been a bit of a hoarder when it comes to links. Thinking back to the early Web 2.0 days, I wondered how many training sessions I delivered on social bookmarking. For younger readers, social bookmarking was the use of online services that allowed users to add, annotate, edit, and share bookmarks. I started with del.icio.us, moved on to Diigo, and eventually reverted to saving them in my browser. Once my list of links went above 5,000, I resolved to return to a bookmark manager. I needed an easy way to save, organise, and find my bookmarks across all my devices. Let me introduce Raindrop.io.
Raindrop.io is a dedicated bookmark manager with extra features over those social bookmarking site that increase the usefulness of a collection of links. My free account uses Google SSO, and I have downloaded the browser extensions for Edge and Firefox. Adding bookmarks with the extension takes just a couple of clicks, and everything syncs across your browsers.
Raindrop has several improvements over the old Web 2.0 social bookmarking sites. You can customise each bookmark with notes and, like Diigo, sort them into collections, add tags, or mark items as favourites for quick access. There’s also Tabs, a feature that saves your browser session with one click.
To browse your bookmarks, click Extensions and then choose the sidebar option to open the bookmark manager alongside your current page. The search bar lets you find bookmarks by name, tags, date, or type, or filter to show only favourites.
Raindrop also offers useful tools for research. The Highlight feature provides some Zotero-like functionality with a single action: highlight (Alt + X) important passages and organise them based on importance or category. Another powerful tool is the AI-assisted search, which can find references even if the keyword isn’t in the title. So, if you only remember a specific word or quote from an article, you can still track it down.
Raindrop also supports collaboration, reminiscent of 2006 when social bookmarking was at its zenith. Your bookmarks are private by default, but you can share collections via public URLs, which can be followed using another Web 2.0 technology: RSS.
Sorting in Raindrop is more flexible than traditional bookmark folders. Tags and collections let you categorise content, and you can save one article in multiple collections for cross-referencing. You also have the option to export your links if you ever wish to move to another bookmark manager—but why would you?