Had heard of Simpy from FN and even had happened to visit a simpy site but it just looked like extra work to move from my existing collection of links on del.icio.us...till I happened to arrive at it via de.lirio.us, while checking all the social bookmark sites that line up blog articles of news sites...just so ppl can quickly bookmark the article...permalink is not enough any more.

I saw a lot of change on the homepage and it had got better by this revisit. :) As i was looking at all the social bookmarking sites, I was looking for a site that allows private bookmarks, primarily since i need a bookmarking site not just to share socially but also to have a centrally located copy of the same such that i could have access to my bookmarks whether i'm at home or at university without cluttering all browsers on all pc's with my enormous set of bookmarks (well not as enormous as FN's :) Among all, I noticed that simpy had that feature and upon checking out the site i felt it was just the right choice (scroll below for reasons i simpy love it) but what about my existing 250 links on del.icio.us? As soon as I signed up and got logged in, the page to import existing bookmarks came up (clever idea). As I didn't realise that simpy is already del.icio.us friendly, I went to del.icio.us to export bookmarks with tags and descriptions only to find that my tags will be replaced by a single tag that i'll be entering in the import bookmarks form. Importing from del.icio.us is real easy and perfect. you need not navigate away from simpy while you enter your login details of del.icio.us and choose whether the imported links should be marked as private (for your eyes and login only :D ) or as public. Since my bookmarks had so far been public i kept them so. Del.icio.us bookmarks imported this way have their tags and notes preserved as well which is very important coz tags are one of the appealing main reasons for using such a service rather than just dumping the bookmarks.html file in any of the myriad free web spaces available or even worse on a portable storage device.

Ok, so by now My Simpy is ready to serve fresh links from DP's twisted tours of cyberspace. Only one thing that remains and has been kept for the ultimate effect are the reasons why moving to simpy wasn't just pure attraction (or maybe it was ;): -

1. Simpy allows private bookmarks


2. Simpy allows multi-word tags


3. Simpy allows smooth migration from del.icio.us


4. Simpy allows searching a user's bookmarks without actually logging in. del.icio.us by default if not logged in searches the entire site.


5. Simpy shows a select few of the tags that the user has used among top tags (most used tags) and recent tags, so a visitor can directly go to a subset of the bookmarks which have a tag relevant to his/her need as well as search directly thru the provided search box. For the un-tagged links, you might do a (full-text) search...just type in your query in the search box on the user's bookmarks homepage.


6. Simpy not only provides RSS/Atom feeds for your bookmarks but allows you to keep track of your favorite people's bookmarks via watchlists. Better than watchlists is the watchlists filter option, which lets you not just subscribe to people saving links of your interest but to keep track of only those links which are of your interest. after all we all have myriad interests...don't we? del.icio.us came up recently with the network feature, but to me it looks like a bookmarks of bookmark lists with some bare inter-networking and socializing going on between the members of the network.


7. Detect broken, forgotten and even redirected bookmarks. Simpy constantly crawls, checks, and re-indexes your bookmarks, allowing you to quickly see all your broken bookmarks and fix them.


8. Simpy Notes. This is something that i looked up right now. An extra service just to keep the user interested. These are not exactly the notes that you attach to del.icio.us bookmarks but kind of random bits of textual info that u might want to save for later reference while browsing the www. google also has it's google notebook product but a google account is not as accessible as a simpy account. so now you could even have say the links to download all your favorite software in a notepage typed at home and go to the university and squeeze the bandwidth limits and get all the MB's and GB's of software :) There are examples of shopping lists and to-do's but those are not exactly what i have in mind for stuff that i want to get access to anytime and anywhere.


9. Besides providing syndicated feeds for both user's bookmarks (all) and user's bookmarks (by a tag), simpy allows to generate a feed from a search query...like a saved search query, like google blogsearch's auto-generated feed for it's search results


10. Simpy allows storing, accessing and retrieving bookmarks et al using the REST API and provides client libraries in java, python, php, ruby and perl

I suppose that's a whole lotta love for simpy....still loads more reasons to explore and appreciate this service.