del.icio.us: I don't get it
Posted on September 7th, 2004
I keep seeing references to del.icio.us, a web-based bookmark manager with a social-software twist. In "The human information filter," John Udell writes:
A tag in del.icio.us is really a topic in a publish/subscribe network. When I assign a tag to an item, I'm routing the item to a topic. Anyone who subscribes to that topic using its RSS feed can monitor the items flowing to it.
If anyone can publish to a topic, won't the signal-to-noise ratio degrade? Yes, but del.icio.us has another ace up its sleeve. For a given topic, you could subscribe to all items, but you might rather subscribe to postings only from people whose views on that topic you trust.
The ability to bring your bookmarks out into the open is useful and helpful, absolutely. Here's an example of someone using del.icio.us to pull their bookmarks onto their site. And even without the sharing aspect, Chris Shiflett explains the practicality of the service:
I finally decided to start using del.icio.us to manage my bookmarks, because I have a disorganized collection residing on multiple computers and in multiple browsers - I can never find what I'm looking for. As an example, I can never remember the name of that Web site where you can check any mailbox or that list of PHP powered sites. Of course, this also means that it will take me quite a while to locate all of my bookmarks and import them into my del.icio.us bookmark collection.
I can easily imagine a situation where any of the people I've just quoted discover a great page, then share the wealth by publishing it to del.icio.us. All I have to do is monitor their individual bookmark pages as Udell suggests, or monitor the topic pages I'm interested in and keep an eye out for trusted sources. But it seems like a lot of effort just for the sake of an endorsement. Effort on the publish side, because the person posting the bookmark has to tag it appropriately so it can get the right category. Effort on the subscribe side, because a new information stream has opened. If I'm looking for specific information I'll want to search someone's blog plus their del.icio.us bookmarks. It's nice if the two can meld together, as they do on rousette.org.uk, but that's up to the publisher.
Compare that with the traditional way of bookmarking a page: Click a submenu, confirm the title, and go. Fast and simple. Granted, it's incredibly limiting-- how many hundreds of items does your bookmark menu contain?-- and completely ignorant of presence (separate browsers on separate computers have separate bookmark collections) but the amount of information is similar to what you'll find on del.icio.us: link, name, and date of submission.
I've written about the idea of a global history browser before. Despite the social benefits, del.icio.us doesn't do it for me because it doesn't address any of the weaknesses of the bookmark metaphor. You don't ordinarily have a hundred bookmarks in a hundred different books, let alone a single book (well, bay if it's really big and you're doing some heavy research). A literal bookmark is a place keeper to help you find your way back to a certain spot, but then you move forward and put the bookmark somewhere else.
A clipping, on the other hand, is a different story. You could take hundreds of those from a single source or hundreds of sources, and stockpile them all away in some safe place. The value of the clipping isn't context as much as it is content. Clippings are also easier to collect-- just rip the page out and off you go.
If del.icio.us was a social clipping service, and you could clip something with the click of a button and have machine analysis take care of the rest, yet still have the sociability that's there now, then I think you'd be onto something.