"What HotLinks offers to the enterprise is a potentially more intuitive way of fostering collaboration. What it offers to the grand old Internet space we all live in is a much more scalable way of building a large or niche Internet directory with zero labor costs. And oh yes, a really neat way to save your bookmarks."
A few years from now, searching, commenting, publishing, and keeping track of it all will probably stand closer one to another. Hotlinks needs to integrate some light groupware features, such as the ability for several users to contribute to a common directory made from bookmarks (collabookmarktory) and the ability for one user to bookmark to several accounts. RadioUserland is heading in that direction, but in my opinion it won’t really catch steam if it doesn’t replace browser-based bookmarks (everyone uses bookmarks but only some power users are interested in maintaining a directory.) Part of Blogger’s strength is the extreme ease with which you can use it to collaborate, while my experience with Backflip and Hotlinks is that group activity came as an afterthought.
Hotlinks has a Top 100, but as with Alexa’s public data, they don’t give enough context to assess how significant this ranking is.
12/22/02 update: Jonathan Abrams‘ new venture: Friendster.
01/29/05 update: (social) bookmark managers.