First Look At Bookmarking Demon 4 Beta

There are a lot of new changes in the recently released Bookmarking Demon 4 Beta and I like to give a quick overview of the new features of this version. I’ve been using it for a couple of days now, and even though it’s only 60% complete, I’m actually quite impressed with what I’ve seen so far.

The first thing you’ll notice after downloading BMD4 is that there is no installer. Just run the executable and the program launches. This is especially useful now if you want to carry BookmarkingDemon 4 on your thumb-drive or sync it with a web syncing service like DropBox. Speaking of sharing though, one not so cool change in BMD4 is with the license agreement. The previous version of Bookmarking Demon allowed you to run your copy on multiple computers simultaneously. Unfortunately starting with version 4, you can install the program on multiple computers but only one instance of Bookmarking Demon can be run at a time.

When you launch BookmarkingDemon, you’ll first notice the complete UI overhaul. All the buttons are nice and big, and it just feels more accessible than the spartan interface of BMD3. At the top left, you’ll notice the ‘For Beginner’ and ‘For Experts’ tabs. Beginner mode essentially hides many of the advanced features of the interface so that novice users aren’t overwhelmed. Experts mode gives you access to everything.

Creating Accounts

The account creation page is the first thing you will see when launching Bookmarking Demon. Creating accounts is similar to BMD3 except that everything is streamlined by being accessible on the same page. By separating usernames with commas, Bookmarking Demon will randomly choose a username for each account you create. In BMD4 beta, there are currently on 5 main bookmarking sites: Delicious, a1-webmarks, searchles, faves.com, and spurl.net. More should be coming in the final release. Press the Create Now button and Bookmarking Demon goes off to create your accounts. You’ll be required to enter a captcha for any sites that require it. Once it’s done, you’ll get a dialog showing you whether or not Bookmarking Demon was able to create your account or not. You’re also reminded to check the email you used and verify any of the accounts that require email verification.

Bookmarking Your Pages

Adding your pages is now super easy to do as well. Just enter your urls in the textbox and click the Add Now button. Bookmarking Demon will now by default, automatically try and grab your site information from the meta tags. New to BMD4 is the { | } syntax in the description field. This allows you to specify alternate keywords in your descriptions to help avoid any duplicate content penalties. Now you can enter something like “Bookmarking Demon is a {great|impressive|awesome} piece of software” and BMD will choose between one of those 3 keywords when submitting to a particular site.

It is important when submitting your urls to the main bookmarking sites to avoid appearing like a spammer. One way to do this is to hide your links among other legitimate links. A great new feature is the ability to add RSS feeds, and Bookmarking Demon will randomly pull articles from these feeds your specify and submit them along with each of your urls. You can set this in the Preferences (available in Expert Mode). I’ve been using the rss feeds from Digg and Techcrunch and it works quite well.

Once you’ve set up your urls and added your feeds, it’s a simple matter to hit the Start Bookmarking button and submit your sites. A dialog pops up with a lot of information telling you what exactly the program is doing in real time. After several minutes, all your urls should be added. In each of my tests, all my bookmarks were successful submitted to each of the 5 main sites.

All in all, I think the BMD4 beta is quite an improvement over its predecessor. I like the UI changes quite a bit and the whole process of creating accounts and submitting your sites just feels a lot easier to do than before. Of course, it only supports 5 main bookmarking sites at the moment which is somewhat lacking. I’m hoping to see more added soon, as well as the introduction of the pinging feature. There are also several options in the preferences that I haven’t played around with yet, so I’m interested in doing some more exploration. I know existing owners of Bookmarking Demon have been impatient while waiting for the final release of Bookmarking Demon 4, but I think the beta is a nice step, and it shows us that Edwin is working to make Bookmarking Demon great. While we’re in this beta period, you can still get in at the old $97 price. So if you’re contemplating buying BMD4, make sure to get in while you can before the price gets raised.