Clipped.

Last week, everyone’s favorite social bookmarking service Delicious, redesigned their site and re-branded themselves, dropping a few full-stops in the process.

While I really like the new look and appreciate the new approach Yahoo! is taking for its social bookmarking service, I have to ask the question:

Is bookmarking relevant anymore?

Let’s face it: when most of us are looking for information, we usually search for it, or ask someone we know might have access to that information. Managing a collection of bookmarks — whether in a messy browser system or on a tag-based social web system — is a tedious task and quickly becomes unwieldy.

Tools like Twitter, Google Reader, Tumblr, and Evernote all make bookmarking systems like Delicious obsolete. They offer easy access to collected information through searching, sharing, and questioning rather than a rigid system of taxonomic organization.

The new Firefox 3 Awesome Bar is going to do even more to kill bookmarking: instead of needing to remember URLs, users can simply remember what the page is about and type that into the address bar. The browser now “remembers” for the user. Brilliant.

I stopped using Delicious about sixteen months ago, finding the practice tiring and tedious. Was that a bad idea? Am I missing something here?

Do you still use a social bookmarking service? Has your use declined over the past months?

Download Firefox, Set World Record

Today is Firefox Download Day, where hundreds of thousands of people around the world will download the newly released Firefox 3. If you download the browser today, you’ll be part of a Guinness World Record attempt for the most browser downloads in one day.

If being part of a world record doesn’t inspire you to download Firefox, the browser improvements definitely will.

The list of updates on the new version of everyone’s favorite open-source browser is extensive. Among the big changes include a better bookmarking interface, faster speed, lower memory usage, and seamless plug-in management. And while I’ve been enjoying all those features in the betas and release candidates so far, the big selling point for me is the new awesome bar.

Allow me to explain in a few words: the awesome bar replaces the location bar so that you can find what you want quickly and easily. It does that by searching both the URLs and titles of your recently visited pages and calling up the ones you visit most. Which means, if you regularly visit Eloquation.com, just typing ‘el’ should get you what you’re looking for in a matter of microseconds. That easy.

Deb’s got a better review of how it all works on her site, but I am confident that further iterations of the awesome bar will change the way people use their browsers in the near future. If you’re ready to experience a forward-thinking shift in the way you interact with your browser, I’d highly recommend upgrading to Firefox 3 today, on Download Day.

And if you’re still using Internet Explorer, get a real browser already.