The bookmarking space is getting very crowded indeed. Microsoft recently launched their bookmarking service, Windows Live Favorites. At first glance, it seems to be just another del.icio.us clone. But, at further inspection, it’s a lot worse.

Favorites is part of the Windows Live service, Microsoft’s foray into web applications. All the typical bookmarking service features are present in Favorites. You can add a bookmarklet to quickly favorite websites with a pop up window. I actually like this type of bookmarking method better than the redirection method in del.icio.us. Redirecting can sometimes be a bit jarring on the surfing experience. The pop-up method is also seen at Blue Dot, another social bookmarking contender to watch out for.

The interface for managing your bookmarks is all AJAXified. But, somehow it feels a bit clunky, like the whole interface is going to fall apart at any moment. At times, I found that buttons were unresponsive for long periods of time. They certainly have a few UI issues to sort out.

The service allows you to enter a description and tags along with the URL. After building up some links, you’re able to star them, somewhat like Gmail’s star feature. Later, you can sort by stars, and see what links you’ve marked. In addition, you’re able to view all your tags (there doesn’t seem to be a tag cloud feature, so all you get is a flat list). You can also directly preview each of your bookmarks by clicking on the preview button, which opens the bookmark in a columnized frame. I wouldn’t see myself using this much, but if you’re doing a lot of bouncing back and forth between each bookmark, it could speed things up.

Currently, users can import bookmarks from IE, Netscape, Firefox, and del.icio.us. I entered in my del.icio.us username, and tried importing my del.icio.us bookmarks, but was only able to import the latest 30 bookmarks. It was, however, successful in getting all the tags and descriptions for each item.

Favorites has a spotlight-like search at the top of the page, which searches your bookmarks instantly as you type. The response was pretty quick, and searches all the text and tags.

But wait, where’s the social bookmarking aspect? There is a sharing attribute for each bookmark, but there is no obvious way for you to share or view other people’s bookmarks. It turns out that you’re only able to publish your latest bookmarks on your MSN Spaces. You will need to first include the Windows Live Favorites module.

Overall, Windows Live Favorites brings nothing new to the social bookmarking table. Also, the bookmarking system is pretty closed, in the sense that the only way to share bookmarks is through an MSN Spaces account. Microsoft needs to open up if they want users to more effectively share their favorite sites. They can easily do this by providing a direct interface within their Favorites service to see other people’s bookmarks (and perhaps a zeitgeist of popular links, like the one del.icio.us provides). An open API would be even better, but I don’t expect them to do that anytime soon.

Then again, maybe Favorites is supposed to be more of a personal online bookmarking service, with less of an emphasis on the social aspect of bookmarking.