Switching to del.icio.us
April 24th, 2005I was pleasantly surprised last week when Joshua Schachter took funding for del.icio.us. Even more so because Fred Wilson, who sits on our board of directors, was part of the investment group. I can’t wait to see what comes out of it. Even if the business model is not yet clear, as Fred points out in a really honest and interesting post, del.icio.us has great momentum and community around a solid, simple idea.
I’ve been playing with del.icio.us for several months now, and while I appreciate the emergent potential of it, there are two really important (to me) pieces that aren’t yet in place: user interface and link privacy.
The direction that the user interface has to go is fairly obvious, and I think the funding will provide for that. In general, access to bookmarks needs to be quicker and easier. On the web, this means AJAX powered A9/Google type features; auto-complete, inline filtering, etc. On the client, this means browser toolbars and extensions. I know there are lots and lots of little projects under way in this area, but I am yet to find something that is truly useful. This is doing nothing for me:
Apart from the user interface, I think link privacy is important. This might be peculiar to me, but I have two types of links:
- Utility Links - This is stuff that I use all of the time, mostly online services (search engines, online banking, shopping, etc) and internal company links (development servers, intranet pages, bug trackers, etc).
- General Links - This is stuff that I don’t regularly visit, but is worth saving a link to. Everything from the Sushi Eating Howto to Dipamo’s BBQ in Toronto. This is the long tail.
The first type of links, utility links, are of no use to del.icio.us, it’s the second type, general links, that del.icio.us is built on. My problem though is that there is a subset of the second type that I don’t want to share, at least not without some degree of control. Maybe I’m embarrassed and I don’t want people to know that I link to several beginner C++ pages, or maybe I’m about to release a new product and don’t want to give anything away by posting the dozen links that I have to reviews of similar offerings. Either way, I need the ability to selectively share.
So the two types of links can be extended to three; two private, and one public:
- Private Utility Links
- Private General Links
- Public General Links
Right now, del.icio.us is pretty good at the third. With a bit of user interface pixie dust it will be really good. The second simply requires a public/private flag. Extra points for group based sharing. The first also requires the public/private flag, but more importantly, it requires either a way of distinguishing those links from other links for purposes of making them easier to access, or a user interface for accessing links that is so slick that it’s not required. Most likely a combination of the two.
Anyway, I’m switching over to del.icio.us lock, stock. We’ll see how it goes. I think these guys are going to do good things.
Tags: delicious, folksonomy, tagging
April 25th, 2005 at 10:08 pm
Web 2.0: Bottom-up and Self-Organizing
When I was working on the first release of Photoshop Album, one of the biggest areas of contention was around tags. It was clear that there was a benefit to building an organizational model around tags, but it was unclear…
May 2nd, 2005 at 3:01 pm
Hm, you should take a look at Simpy: 1) people always point out its prettier UI compared to delicious, 2) Simpy has private links (as well as notes), and a few other features delicious lacks, like multiple inboxes and inbox filters (called Topics/Topic Filters in Simpy).
Simpy is at http://simpy.com .
May 18th, 2005 at 2:39 pm
I totally agree the funding made the decision for me. Simpy is nice, but not nearly the user-base, especially considering the funding.