Tea Leaves

del.icio.us

by peterb

The "recent bookmarks" on the sidebar come from one of Joshua Schachter's projects, del.icio.us. Amusingly, I think I might have set this off when complaining on zephyr a few years ago about bookmark management -- I use too many computers for local bookmark lists to be of any use at all. I kept whining and whining about how I wanted a way to not just access the same bookmarks from different computers, but easily, trivially add them from anywhere, too. Editing an HTML page was too much work; it violated my delicate sensibilities and disturbed the flow of internet chi.

Joshua whipped up a solution involving bookmarklets, but I was too lazy at the time to really investigate it, so I settled on a hacked up solution using unison (an rsync-like utility). Eventually, I just stopped using that and let my bookmarks fall into disrepair. I looked at del.icio.us a few times and didn't really 'get it' because I think the front page design isn't really sensible -- it doesn't adequately explain what it is. There's documentation, but it's fairly dry. The best way to understand it is to register an account and start adding your own bookmarks. Then it will become apparent.

Services like this -- and there are a few imitators, some who have copied the idea, and some who (it seems to me) have actually stolen Joshua's code without credit -- have adopted the moniker "social bookmarks", but for me that's not really the draw. It turns out that I don't really care, for the most part, what other people are bookmarking. What I want is a central repository of my bookmarks, and a convenient way of organizing them so that I can find them later without having to go through a huge list. In any browser, I find that I use the bookmarks until I fill up an entire menu. The moment I have to scroll they become useless.

So really, I want gmail for bookmarks. Which is more or less what del.icio.us is. When you add a bookmark, you assign it a tag and a description, and those are searchable. If you put the relevant link on your bookmarks bar, adding a new bookmark is a two click process.

There are a few features that I'm hoping del.icio.us adds:

• Private bookmarks. I'd like to be able to put something into del.icio.us without having it pop up on the main page. Whether it's research for a future article, lesbian left-handed midget albino pornography, or just something personal, I'd like to be able to make it so that only I can access them.
• Conversely, I'd like to be able to search other people's (public) bookmarks in addition to my own.
• The "bookmarks by date" view is currently useless. I will never remember that I bookmarked something on June 17th. If this was in one month chunks rather than per each day, that might be better.
• In the "as long as I'm asking for a pony" wish list category, full "bumbot style" snapshots of the web page as it was when I added the bookmark.

Accept no imitations. If you're not using del.icio.us yet, you're missing out. Give it a shot.

Additional Resources

• Joshua is also the guy who brought you memepool and GeoURL.
• I still find the del.icio.us home page unappealing.
• There is documentation.
• You can register for an account, or see the most popular recent links.
• Of course there's the ubiquitous rss feed.
• All of the really cool kids have delicious pages: shelby and acm and many others. Everyone's doin' it.

Posted by peterb at June 10, 2004 12:59 PM | Bookmark This