Since 1996, several bookmark management services have developed. One of them, Delicious, which was founded in 2003, popularized the term social bookmarking. Free social bookmarking tools serve the purpose of saving bookmarks that reference sites so that people can easily access sites that they desire to return to and share those sites with their friends.

Free social bookmark tools are offered by centralized online services that allow people to add bookmarks of web documents, edit them, annotate them, and share them. One of the big features of free bookmarking tools is tagging. It allows people to organize their bookmarks in flexible manner by giving users control over how they group and find their bookmarks.

Free social bookmark tools are usually used to create bookmarks that are public, but they are also frequently used to save bookmarks privately and share bookmarks with specific groups and individual people. When viewing shared bookmarks, users can use free social bookmark tools to organize the shared bookmarks chronologically or by tag or category. Free social bookmark tools also allow people to find shared bookmarks through a search engine.

As the use of free social bookmark tools has rapidly grown more popular, new features to make them easier to use and capable of doing more things have become available. Some of the newer features of free social bookmark tools let users import and export bookmarks across browsers and email bookmarks. As social networking has become popular, more features have also been added to social bookmarks to adapt them to networks like facebook.