It’s strange that a German service like Mister Wong should have a Chinese name, but for whatever reasons it should be, in Germany it’s a remarkable competitor to well known del.ico.us. Just let me show you the profile of this service, whose performance is in many aspects parallel to the benchmark del.icio.us, but in some parts is different.

The header of Mr Wong shows the user above the logo at the left side. In the middle you have the search box with the options websites, favorites or tags. The first, that are the websites stored in Mr Wong, about 5,7 millions (08.09.28). The second option is the search in the bookmarks of the specific user, i.e. a custom search. And the third search option is only for tags noted by the users.

The next line under the header is the central navigation of the service:

The bookmarks as known from del.icio.us are ordered under “Favoriten = favorites”, the network under “Buddys.” “Charts” and “Spotlight” are results of popularity ranks, ordered in thematical structure.

For example the charts:

So you can see the most popular bookmarks in these categories. Gimmicks, I think. But really helpful, and the attribute that differs from del.icio.us, that are the “Gruppen = groups”. That’s an additional social feature with surplus value. It’s possible to setup or join a group and to collect bookmarks together. If you are logged in and chose the register sheet “groups”, not only the groups in which you are member are displayed, but also groups you could be interested in!

The other parts of the performance of Mr Wong are the same as in many social software applications, for example the tag cloud:

Even if you don’t know German, you will recognize some of the words listed in this tagcloud, won’t you? The interests are all the same, also the services. Colleagues, who collect bookmarks in delicious and Mr Wong like also the latter. And because like in every good social service its easy to IM – and export bookmarks here …

But what value does this review have for you, who – I suppose – will not sign in to this German service?

Think of search!

As in del.icio.us, as in other social repositories (think of flickr, think of slideshare) it is of high interest, what links, documents, images or presentations are searchable, because the entries are hand selected, tagged, often with higher quality and due to the restraint more relevant. Also here: You can search the bookmarks of Mr Wong like in del.icio.us without being a member for content and tags. The results are often added with previews. If you are searching for example for “personen+suchmaschine” (Suchmaschine = search engine), you will find in the first results the two special search engines 123people.de and yasni.de, we’ve reviewed some times ago …

By Juergen Plieninger