Users of the World Wide Web who wish to classify, store, search, and share Internet bookmarks employ a system called social bookmarking.

On such a network or system, users of the Internet are able to store lists of online resources that they find to be helpful. Such lists are then made accessible to the public by users of a particular website or network. Then, users who have the same interests are able to look at the links arranged according to category, tags, topic, or on a random basis.

Besides bookmarks for web pages, there are also services that are specialized to a particular format or subject available, such as shopping items, wineries, feeds, videos, books, and more.

The idea of shared Internet bookmarks can be traced back to the spring of 1996, when itList.com was launched. In the next three years, services providing online bookmarks became a lot more competitive. Such venture backed initiatives as Clip2, Backflip, Blink, Quiver, and Hotlinks were launched. The vast majority of these early companies went bust, as they were not able to make money.

Then, in the years 2005 and 2006, a new wave of social bookmarking sites went live. The most popular of these was Furl, del.icio.us, and Simpy. The next wave of social bookmarking sites included Netvouz, Ma.gnolia, Diigo, and StumbleUpon. Social bookmarking is also applied to news items by such sites as The Uncut Times, reddit, Digg, Newsvine, and BEENclicked. The new Netscape also offers this capability.

In the year 2007, it was announced by IBM that they would be entering the social bookmarking network. BBC has also recently added social bookmarking links to its web site.

Recent Web 2.0 startups such as LinkDoozer have been employing the latest web development technology in order to render interactive, online bookmarking combined with a social networking component.

In the social bookmarking nexus, users are able to store links to particular websites that they find to be helpful. Such lists of links are then made accessible either to the public at large, or to a target network. Then, people who have similar interests are able to access the links. Some social bookmarking services allow for privacy on a per bookmark basis.

Social bookmarking services also categorize their resources via a utilization of user defined keywords or tags that tend to be assigned on an informal basis. The vast majority of social bookmarking services enable users to search for particular bookmarks that have been associated with given tags. The resources can then be ranked according to the number of users who have bookmarked them. A lot of these social bookmarking services also make use of algorithms as a means of drawing inferences from tag keywords that have been assigned to resources through examining clusters of keywords and analyzing the relationship among the particular keywords.

There are now some search engines that will only crawl websites that have been listed on social bookmark web sites. As classification and ranking is an ongoing process, a lot of social bookmarking services enable users to subscribe to particular web feeds that are based on tags.