5 ms·

Please don't get me wrong, but I never understood what "social" bookmarking is useful for. As long as my supposed ignorance persists, I'm sorry to crash the par

by codeup 15y ago

Please don't get me wrong, but I never understood what "social" bookmarking is useful for. As long as my supposed ignorance persists, I'm sorry to crash the party with a simple question: why is Delicious relevant? Assuming many or most here think it is relevant, it should be possible to respond to my question reasonably, without buzzwords and with only moderate downvoting.

noahlt 15y ago
I used to use del.icio.us as a sort of online magazine. I would read the feed for posts tagged "python" and see all the blog posts about Python that people were reading that day. My usage was very similar to the way people use Twitter and Hacker News today.
- dr_ 15y ago
  Now there's an idea for an iPad app, along the lines of Flipboard and News.me but using delicious bookmarks.
tlianza 15y ago
I think it's mostly useful to keep track of all of the interesting stuff you've found on the web, so you can quickly find "that interesting article you remember reading about the javascript 'this' keyword" without searching the entire internet. The social part is, I think, less interesting but occasionally handy (ex. here are all the interesting things I've read about javascript recently: http://www.delicious.com/tlianza/javascript http://www.delicious.com/tlianza/javascript ) and I think the aggregated data could be interesting, but as Digg's woes have shown, it's proven challenging to make a compelling experience around it.
asolove 15y ago
It's funny, I started to write a reply explaining my love of Delicious. But the more I articulated the reasons, the more I realized I loved what it was, and don't really use it anymore. 1. Before browsers could sync my bookmarks across multiple computers, posting them to delicious was the best way to have access to them anywhere. 2. Before instapaper let me save articles to read later, Delicious was a great way to have a tagged backlog of things to explore whenever I have freetime. 3. Before Twitter, the best way to know what your favorite developers or designers were thinking about was to follow what they were bookmarking on Delicious. 4. Before HN, looking at the usage of tags and stories per tag helped me figure out what technologies or topics were growing in popularity and find out what to read first about them.
- kin 15y ago
  well, your post is separated into 4 different sources. my guess is delicious isn't going to be acquired and left alone but instead improved upon by integrating and improving upon your 4 delicious replacements
- superkarn 15y ago
  There's something to be said about focusing on one thing and doing it well. (Not to say Delicious didn't do any/all of those well.)
  - stdbrouw 15y ago
    "Not to say Delicious didn't do any/all of those well." Then what exactly _are_ you saying? :-)
    - code_duck 15y ago
      I think he's saying that the 'focusing on one thing' part is important. Regardless of how well you do a task, if you offer many services, you might not come to be associated as strongly with a particular task in the consumer's mind. Thus, when they come to think of that function, specialists come to mind rather than the you, the generalist. That's how the theory goes, anyway.
- bluespace 15y ago
  I think because Yahoo did not keep updating delicious that these other serves took hold of each of the niches out of delicious. While each of the other services that you mention has their own strengths, I miss having the ability to tag something with multiple tags to better sort things into different categories.
- kareemamin 15y ago
  I find this post really interesting. I've been thinking about this space and those 4 particular use cases for some time now and my co-founders and I started a company - The Shared Web - to make a product to tackle the last 2 cases in particular. We built a service where you subscribe to the topics you care about and get content shared from the people you trust. We show you content that is popular from the whole community but emphasize content from the people that you "follow". Would love to have you try it out at www.thesharedweb.com and let me know what you think.
VMG 15y ago
You can see trending links relating to you interests for example. You can also find interesting link collections from people with shared interests.
msg 15y ago
I'm an extroverted hoarder. The only way I can close a tab in my browser is by saving it forever and broadcasting it to the entire internet. Only half joking, I have 134 tabs open. People like to be building something. Delicious is less edited than the wikipedia but it's still a massive datastore, semantically tagged, and filtered by its users. And if Delicious would get off their cans (and it looks like they will) it could be the single best way to share a link.
josefresco 15y ago
the community is why I still go back however i joined because browser bookmarks were a pain, syncying them was a pain and having an RSS feed of our bookmarks instead of native within the app just made sense. The social aspect was just icing on the cake, and at the time (think Digg at it's height) social-everything was hot. back to the community... When I need to find a good link or resource related to the web design/developer market searching delicious shows me what other people have bookmarked. It's like Google but only results which have been liked by users, so much so that they wanted to save it for later. I still think that's one of the most powerful aspects of this small-ish community. The problem lies when you scale it, as I have no interest in searching the bookmarks of the CNN/Facebook/YouTube crowd. Kind of like why Digg was so great. In the beginning it was news submitted and voted on by geeks like me
callmeed 15y ago
My take is this: searching delicious for tags of my interests always turned up cool results I would never find in Google. Example: I write software for, and have a strong interest in, professional photographers and I keep bookmarks of my favorite photographers for inspiration. Many of them were found via delicious.
jsdalton 15y ago
Delicious predates all the social media hype and is probably better thought of as "Web 2.0" application. Basically, it's Flickr for URLs. It's just a dead simple way of saving and tagging URLs. The social aspect is more of an ancillary benefit, the idea being that when you get millions of people organizing links by tag, some interesting structures start to emerge...e.g. you can generate something like a tag cloud for the entire web. If the above analysis sounds dated, that's because it is. Conceptually, Delicious is really an app straight out of 2006. But like Flickr, it's one of the handful that's worth having around in more or less original form. The key to grokking Delicious btw is that it's not for "bookmarks" like the ones you probably have on your Bookmark Bar in Chrome right now. It's for articles or links of interest that you might want to reference later. Presumably there are other services that do or claim to do this better, but I have yet to find one that's stripped down to the same level of usefulness as Delicious.
- SoftwareMaven 15y ago
  That is exactly how I used it. I've since moved on to Pinboard in the great Yahoo! scare of '10 and am very happy there. One of my favorite features is emailing myself URLs from my iDevice. I've never really cared what others are bookmarking, as I've found Google has traditionally been just as good as a big group of anonymous people at telling me what to look at. Cross-link that with people I follow on Twitter and it might get interesting, though...
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
- ghshephard 15y ago
  Thanks - that was a great description. After having missed it for the last umpteen years, I've created a Delicious account and have started using it.
- starwed 15y ago
  The way Firefox currently works makes that redundant -- I don't have a menu or toolbar full of bookmarks, I just star pages I'm interested in so I can find them through the "awesomebar" later. And of course it syncs across Firefox installs, including my Droid.
micheljansen 15y ago
I think I only use 20% of Delicious, but it is the 20% I love it for. To me, Delicious is like a really organized attic or "backlog" of interesting stuff I found online and want to remember for later. It allows me to find things back because of the tags, but it doesn't take as much time as writing blog posts and I don't have to think about burdening my followers the way I have to with Twitter. I actually wrote about it a while back: https://micheljansen.org/blog/entry/614 https://micheljansen.org/blog/entry/614 (see comments) I don't use the social features at all and I am really curious what direction Delicious will take under new management.
- bostonvaulter2 15y ago
  That's just about how I use delicious as well. I only wish the tag search would be improved. I don't want to search for book and books just because some of my posts might be tagged as book, while others are tagged as books. I'd also like a way to easily rename and merge tags.
  - micheljansen 15y ago
    Have you tried tag bundles? It's not great, but it solves part of the problem :)
Groxx 15y ago
It has helped me find things that all other services have failed, and I can get an idea of what it is / what category it is in before visiting the link. I never used the social aspect much, but the public aspect is wonderful. It's a fantastic way to find related sites.
bad_user 15y ago
2 things -- (1) best way to keep your bookmarks organized, synced, available everywhere in any browser + (2) finding interesting links of other people. (2) is very interesting because "rating" on Delicious is not a vanity contest (e.g. Facebook) and people aren't rating because they "agree" with an article (e.g. HN / Reddit). Rating on Delicious is implicit, the action itself (bookmarking) serves another direct purpose to the user; people are bookmarking stuff when they want to return to that article -- much like how Google's ranking algorithm works. Yes, it could be gamed, but it's not a high-priority for spammers yet, and I still find Delicious to be a very low-noise source for interesting stuff (much, much more useful than HN; basically I come here for the comments only). And as an example, searching for Ruby gives you plenty of tutorials in the very first results, searching for "Google" gives links to their interesting assets (like their Fonts directory) -- people are more unlikely to bookmark flames / yellow-journalism; as that pollutes their own database of links. I saw a comment saying it's an app from 2006 -- well, if that's true, 2006 was a lot better than 2011.
pstack 15y ago
I don't know what "social" has to do with it. It's a service that let's me save and archive my bookmarks online, with tags, fulltext searchable, with a long description, accessible from any system and browser and a number out-of-browser interfaces. And in the case of pinboard.in (which I switched to when all the delicious BS went on -- sorry guys, you lost this customer), including an archived version of the actual page, in case it ever goes down. I've been using delicious (or similar) for at least five years. My first reaction when people ask about it is sort of the same reaction I feel when people say "I can't understand why anyone would want tabbed web browsing; can't you just open lots of browser windows?" :)
yaroslavvb 15y ago
I use Delicious to bookmark useful pages I come across, then import those bookmarks into Google Bookmarks. This makes my bookmarks hits show up using regular Google Search. This is better than Google bookmarklets because it's easy to synchronize your bookmarks across multiple google accounts
diamondhead 15y ago
An example usage is following popular feeds; http://delicious.com/popular/biology http://delicious.com/popular/biology http://delicious.com/popular/lisp http://delicious.com/popular/lisp http://delicious.com/popular/finance http://delicious.com/popular/finance To me, Delicious is more valuable than Facebook and Twitter. Social bookmarking lets us to extract information from the chaos.
xiaoma 15y ago
Of course it's nice to have one's bookmarks organized and tagged, but the big benefit for me is seeing what stuff my friends have tagged as useful. I found so many quick references, interesting tutorials and guides for doing things I was interested in that it was far better than any social news aggregator could have been for me. The /popular page was also a news aggregator of sorts in its own right, except that it was searchable by topic and it skewed heavily towards links worth revisiting. A couple of things lead me to gradually stop using delicious. 1) There was a horrible update for their FF plugin a couple of years back that essentially broke the way middle clicks worked (and the way I preferred to use it). 2) My friends stopped using it so much, and so it became gradually less useful for me as well. I still check out the /popular page for things I'm interested on occasion, but the utility from my friends bookmark feeds is almost gone.
nvarsj 15y ago
Simple - it's better than google. My primary use for google these days is searching sites, like this one and stackoverflow. If I want to find an unknown site based on a keyword, delicious guarantees me the best results most of the time.

by codeup 15y ago

noahlt 15y ago

I used to use del.icio.us as a sort of online magazine. I would read the feed for posts tagged "python" and see all the blog posts about Python that people were reading that day. My usage was very similar to the way people use Twitter and Hacker News today.

dr_ 15y ago
Now there's an idea for an iPad app, along the lines of Flipboard and News.me but using delicious bookmarks.

tlianza 15y ago

I think it's mostly useful to keep track of all of the interesting stuff you've found on the web, so you can quickly find "that interesting article you remember reading about the javascript 'this' keyword" without searching the entire internet. The social part is, I think, less interesting but occasionally handy (ex. here are all the interesting things I've read about javascript recently: http://www.delicious.com/tlianza/javascript http://www.delicious.com/tlianza/javascript ) and I think the aggregated data could be interesting, but as Digg's woes have shown, it's proven challenging to make a compelling experience around it.

asolove 15y ago

It's funny, I started to write a reply explaining my love of Delicious. But the more I articulated the reasons, the more I realized I loved what it was, and don't really use it anymore. 1. Before browsers could sync my bookmarks across multiple computers, posting them to delicious was the best way to have access to them anywhere. 2. Before instapaper let me save articles to read later, Delicious was a great way to have a tagged backlog of things to explore whenever I have freetime. 3. Before Twitter, the best way to know what your favorite developers or designers were thinking about was to follow what they were bookmarking on Delicious. 4. Before HN, looking at the usage of tags and stories per tag helped me figure out what technologies or topics were growing in popularity and find out what to read first about them.

kin 15y ago
well, your post is separated into 4 different sources. my guess is delicious isn't going to be acquired and left alone but instead improved upon by integrating and improving upon your 4 delicious replacements
superkarn 15y ago
There's something to be said about focusing on one thing and doing it well. (Not to say Delicious didn't do any/all of those well.)
- stdbrouw 15y ago
  "Not to say Delicious didn't do any/all of those well." Then what exactly _are_ you saying? :-)
  - code_duck 15y ago
    I think he's saying that the 'focusing on one thing' part is important. Regardless of how well you do a task, if you offer many services, you might not come to be associated as strongly with a particular task in the consumer's mind. Thus, when they come to think of that function, specialists come to mind rather than the you, the generalist. That's how the theory goes, anyway.
bluespace 15y ago
I think because Yahoo did not keep updating delicious that these other serves took hold of each of the niches out of delicious. While each of the other services that you mention has their own strengths, I miss having the ability to tag something with multiple tags to better sort things into different categories.
kareemamin 15y ago
I find this post really interesting. I've been thinking about this space and those 4 particular use cases for some time now and my co-founders and I started a company - The Shared Web - to make a product to tackle the last 2 cases in particular. We built a service where you subscribe to the topics you care about and get content shared from the people you trust. We show you content that is popular from the whole community but emphasize content from the people that you "follow". Would love to have you try it out at www.thesharedweb.com and let me know what you think.

VMG 15y ago

You can see trending links relating to you interests for example. You can also find interesting link collections from people with shared interests.

msg 15y ago

I'm an extroverted hoarder. The only way I can close a tab in my browser is by saving it forever and broadcasting it to the entire internet. Only half joking, I have 134 tabs open. People like to be building something. Delicious is less edited than the wikipedia but it's still a massive datastore, semantically tagged, and filtered by its users. And if Delicious would get off their cans (and it looks like they will) it could be the single best way to share a link.

josefresco 15y ago

the community is why I still go back however i joined because browser bookmarks were a pain, syncying them was a pain and having an RSS feed of our bookmarks instead of native within the app just made sense. The social aspect was just icing on the cake, and at the time (think Digg at it's height) social-everything was hot. back to the community... When I need to find a good link or resource related to the web design/developer market searching delicious shows me what other people have bookmarked. It's like Google but only results which have been liked by users, so much so that they wanted to save it for later. I still think that's one of the most powerful aspects of this small-ish community. The problem lies when you scale it, as I have no interest in searching the bookmarks of the CNN/Facebook/YouTube crowd. Kind of like why Digg was so great. In the beginning it was news submitted and voted on by geeks like me

callmeed 15y ago

My take is this: searching delicious for tags of my interests always turned up cool results I would never find in Google. Example: I write software for, and have a strong interest in, professional photographers and I keep bookmarks of my favorite photographers for inspiration. Many of them were found via delicious.

jsdalton 15y ago

Delicious predates all the social media hype and is probably better thought of as "Web 2.0" application. Basically, it's Flickr for URLs. It's just a dead simple way of saving and tagging URLs. The social aspect is more of an ancillary benefit, the idea being that when you get millions of people organizing links by tag, some interesting structures start to emerge...e.g. you can generate something like a tag cloud for the entire web. If the above analysis sounds dated, that's because it is. Conceptually, Delicious is really an app straight out of 2006. But like Flickr, it's one of the handful that's worth having around in more or less original form. The key to grokking Delicious btw is that it's not for "bookmarks" like the ones you probably have on your Bookmark Bar in Chrome right now. It's for articles or links of interest that you might want to reference later. Presumably there are other services that do or claim to do this better, but I have yet to find one that's stripped down to the same level of usefulness as Delicious.

SoftwareMaven 15y ago
That is exactly how I used it. I've since moved on to Pinboard in the great Yahoo! scare of '10 and am very happy there. One of my favorite features is emailing myself URLs from my iDevice. I've never really cared what others are bookmarking, as I've found Google has traditionally been just as good as a big group of anonymous people at telling me what to look at. Cross-link that with people I follow on Twitter and it might get interesting, though...
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
ghshephard 15y ago
Thanks - that was a great description. After having missed it for the last umpteen years, I've created a Delicious account and have started using it.
starwed 15y ago
The way Firefox currently works makes that redundant -- I don't have a menu or toolbar full of bookmarks, I just star pages I'm interested in so I can find them through the "awesomebar" later. And of course it syncs across Firefox installs, including my Droid.

micheljansen 15y ago

I think I only use 20% of Delicious, but it is the 20% I love it for. To me, Delicious is like a really organized attic or "backlog" of interesting stuff I found online and want to remember for later. It allows me to find things back because of the tags, but it doesn't take as much time as writing blog posts and I don't have to think about burdening my followers the way I have to with Twitter. I actually wrote about it a while back: https://micheljansen.org/blog/entry/614 https://micheljansen.org/blog/entry/614 (see comments) I don't use the social features at all and I am really curious what direction Delicious will take under new management.

bostonvaulter2 15y ago
That's just about how I use delicious as well. I only wish the tag search would be improved. I don't want to search for book and books just because some of my posts might be tagged as book, while others are tagged as books. I'd also like a way to easily rename and merge tags.
- micheljansen 15y ago
  Have you tried tag bundles? It's not great, but it solves part of the problem :)

Groxx 15y ago

It has helped me find things that all other services have failed, and I can get an idea of what it is / what category it is in before visiting the link. I never used the social aspect much, but the public aspect is wonderful. It's a fantastic way to find related sites.

bad_user 15y ago

2 things -- (1) best way to keep your bookmarks organized, synced, available everywhere in any browser + (2) finding interesting links of other people. (2) is very interesting because "rating" on Delicious is not a vanity contest (e.g. Facebook) and people aren't rating because they "agree" with an article (e.g. HN / Reddit). Rating on Delicious is implicit, the action itself (bookmarking) serves another direct purpose to the user; people are bookmarking stuff when they want to return to that article -- much like how Google's ranking algorithm works. Yes, it could be gamed, but it's not a high-priority for spammers yet, and I still find Delicious to be a very low-noise source for interesting stuff (much, much more useful than HN; basically I come here for the comments only). And as an example, searching for Ruby gives you plenty of tutorials in the very first results, searching for "Google" gives links to their interesting assets (like their Fonts directory) -- people are more unlikely to bookmark flames / yellow-journalism; as that pollutes their own database of links. I saw a comment saying it's an app from 2006 -- well, if that's true, 2006 was a lot better than 2011.

pstack 15y ago

I don't know what "social" has to do with it. It's a service that let's me save and archive my bookmarks online, with tags, fulltext searchable, with a long description, accessible from any system and browser and a number out-of-browser interfaces. And in the case of pinboard.in (which I switched to when all the delicious BS went on -- sorry guys, you lost this customer), including an archived version of the actual page, in case it ever goes down. I've been using delicious (or similar) for at least five years. My first reaction when people ask about it is sort of the same reaction I feel when people say "I can't understand why anyone would want tabbed web browsing; can't you just open lots of browser windows?" :)

yaroslavvb 15y ago

I use Delicious to bookmark useful pages I come across, then import those bookmarks into Google Bookmarks. This makes my bookmarks hits show up using regular Google Search. This is better than Google bookmarklets because it's easy to synchronize your bookmarks across multiple google accounts

diamondhead 15y ago

An example usage is following popular feeds; http://delicious.com/popular/biology http://delicious.com/popular/biology http://delicious.com/popular/lisp http://delicious.com/popular/lisp http://delicious.com/popular/finance http://delicious.com/popular/finance To me, Delicious is more valuable than Facebook and Twitter. Social bookmarking lets us to extract information from the chaos.

xiaoma 15y ago

Of course it's nice to have one's bookmarks organized and tagged, but the big benefit for me is seeing what stuff my friends have tagged as useful. I found so many quick references, interesting tutorials and guides for doing things I was interested in that it was far better than any social news aggregator could have been for me. The /popular page was also a news aggregator of sorts in its own right, except that it was searchable by topic and it skewed heavily towards links worth revisiting. A couple of things lead me to gradually stop using delicious. 1) There was a horrible update for their FF plugin a couple of years back that essentially broke the way middle clicks worked (and the way I preferred to use it). 2) My friends stopped using it so much, and so it became gradually less useful for me as well. I still check out the /popular page for things I'm interested on occasion, but the utility from my friends bookmark feeds is almost gone.

nvarsj 15y ago

Simple - it's better than google. My primary use for google these days is searching sites, like this one and stackoverflow. If I want to find an unknown site based on a keyword, delicious guarantees me the best results most of the time.