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Published Wednesday, December 14, 2005 by Jacob | Post to Del.icio.us

If you are an active Internet user and under the age of 25 (or 30), you probably fit in one of two categories; either [1] You have tried social networking, but didn't really get what the buzz was about, or [2] you get it, you dig it, and you sit for hours scouring, posting comments and photos, and clicking refresh obsessively.

Everyone has heard of Facebook. At almost 2 years old, it's growth is staggering.

Take a look at the Repeat Usage statistics, in particular and tell me that this isn't a craze bordering on obsession. 70 percent of users return on a daily basis to a site that really isn't all that dynamic. There are no blogs; just personal info, a place to post blurbs on users' "wall", and now pictures. With websites like Facebook and MySpace gaining an almost-disturbing amount of popularity, it seems that our desire for networking has trumped our sound-thinking, skepticism and desire for privacy.

I started thinking about this issue recently, and the question just keeps popping up: Why do we place so much trust in the creators of these websites? Since the emergence of "Web 2.0", it seems that with a simple "We're not evil, try our Beta" everyone is falling over themselves to shell out as much information as it takes.

Stop and think about Facebook for one minute. A 21-year-old Harvard student starts a networking site for college students, and now there are over 5 million users, many of which have probably never looked at the Privacy Policy. After all, Facebook is fun, so they freely post their name, address, school, concentration, political affiliation, friends, plans and even photos in which faces are linked to profiles. Comforted by the idea that this info isn't crawled by search engines, the fact remains that membership is only limited by the ownership of an ".edu" e-mail address (the Wall Street Journal expressed concerns about this, in fact).

What about the Privacy Policy? In the Help Section of Facebook it says, "Facebook respects your privacy. We don't distribute your user information to third parties" followed by "Read more about our Privacy Policy." Click the link and it says oh yeah, one more thing: we just might share your info, and it "may include sharing information with other companies, lawyers, agents or government agencies." This is a pretty typical policy, actually. It's in the section entitled "The Information We Collect" that it gets a little disconcerting.

When you visit the Web Site you may provide us with two types of information: personal information you knowingly choose to disclose that is collected by us and Web Site use information collected by us on an aggregate basis as you and others browse our Web Site.

It goes on to explain cookies, etc., but then ends with this vague third mode of data collection:

I'm not sure what that means, but I do remember something about AOL's updated terms of service.

I'm not usually big on conspiracy theories, but I point out Facebook's privacy policy to highlight some other interesting aspects of this company. It has been just a few months since Accel Partners anno

I do not think the mayor shift is in the OS. I think that all our precious applications are moving online to the browser. Our email is handled perfectly by http://gmail.com/, http://writely.com/ handles our documents, http://del.icio.us/ stores our bookmarks, http://openomy.com/ stores our files... We can even access project management tools online (and for free) ...the OS main purpose is/will be to launch and handle multiple instances of our browsers.

I've backed up my http://del.icio.us/steevc bookmarks just in case they decide to mess it up. I've almost given up using browser bookmarks apart from a few I visit every day.

`...What kind of advice -- both technical and theoretical -- would you give us on conducting a deep and objective study on the Unix desktop? ...`

`... is a project dedicated to sharing usability data with Linux developers. Over the past year, we have conducted many usability tests on different parts of the KDE and GNOME desktops. We created this site to serve as a place where developers can watch videos of these tests. Here you will find over 200 videos of people using Mozilla Firefox, Evolution, Open Office, Banshee, F-Spot and other applications. ...`

Looks like D's already on Make. Read about the geeky lad here & check out those pics.

I'm not sure what yahoo can do to make del.icio.us less desirable.

I use firefox plugins to bookmark sites and the rss feed to review my bookmarks. I rarely, actually visit http://del.icio.us/ I couldn't care what they do to delicious' front page.

(Palo Alto, CA. - DEVELOPING) The Buttes Foundation, a non-for-profit organization dedicated to empowering tomorrow through trolling today, announced victory over the Flock browser and the piddling company behind it. The announcement took place during a packed session at the Scientology center in Mountain View. Very important Buttes operative rolloffle said he found the air deliciously clear of thetans and other impediments in the pursuit of a good troll.

"Quite simply, Flock sucks," opined Buttes spokesman Khaled to an appreciative audience. "But not only does it suck; it is also a failure", he added to nods of agreement. On the wall was a complicated graph showing blogging activity regarding the dead-on-arrival "Social Browser". Khaled pointed to a sharp color change in the second quadrant which corresponded with the introduction of the Go Flock Yourself weblog, which has been detailing the worthlessness of Flock, its authors, and its fans since shortly after the introduction of the ill-fated application.

"As you can see here," said Khaled, "blogging activity about Flock turned decidedly negative after we began to expose its shortcomings". He then added "we also got Scoble to comment on our blog", pausing a minute before saying "lol". Shouts of "roflmao" and "you da man" erupted spontaneously from the crowd.

Rolloffle took over at that point, elaborating on the negative attention Flock has received, and finishing with Buttes's mea culpa, the eradication of the giant Flock advertisement from wordpress.com's front page. While the administrators of WordPress have not returned requests for comment at this time, it can only be assumed that the Go Flock Yourself blog (proudly featured on the front page since shortly after its inception) has made association with Flock a costly and embarrassing proposition.

During a busy Q&A session, the brainchild behind Go Flock Yourself, a diminutive Canadian who goes by the name "Screaming Eagle USA", offerred to clarify the role of the popular weblog now that Flock has officially failed. "Go Flock Yourself is designed to empower the sarcastic and trollish masses of the internet to drop a big, steaming turd all over Web 2.0 and all of its extravagances." Screaming Eagle displayed a slide of recent posts about say-so, yellowikis, and Squidoo, demonstrating a pattern of hard-hitting journalism that leaves no worthless, dollar-stuffed startup with its "perpetual beta" web application untouched. "Our victory over Flock will allow us to leverage all of our core competencies, maximizing ROI across skill domains, in order to architect the synergistic folksonomies that will empower the anti-Web 2.0 revolution."

About Buttes:
The Buttes Foundation is a group of trolls and ne'erdowells that has successfully terrorized the Something Awful forums through its internet terrorist offshoot Team Barry. In recent years, Buttes has expanded the reach of its deadly ruyn-rays to the world's telephone networks and now the blogosphere. More information on Buttes is available at Encyclopedia Dramatica.

About Flock:
Flock is an amateurish fork of Firefox which adds various extensions of marginal utility that integrate unaffiliated services (del.icio.us, flickr, etc.) directly into the browsing experience. Flock also includes a substandard blogging tool which even its most diehard users have had a hard time adopting. Flock is currently burning through approximately $1 million of venture capital, after which point it will promptly fold after failing to b

How can you even *think* let alone say that Web 2.0 doesn't matter on the very same day that Yahoo! buys del.icio.us????

'... Even the CEO shared an office at Google for several months after he arrived. ...'

What was the last time you read a CEO`s penned article for a Magazine?

IMO, the best podcasting "hack" that I have found is using del.icio.us to find, create, and maintain simple podcasts. Just use the tag "system:filetype:mp3" to find only MP3s. (Hint, it also works for other filetypes.)

All recent MP3s: http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/system:filetype:mp3

All popular MP3s: http://del.icio.us/rss/popular/system:filetype:mp3

An example of my own podcast: http://del.icio.us/rss/thzinc/voicemail+outgoing+s ystem:filetype:mp3

And an example of a video podcast ;) : http://del.icio.us/rss/thzinc/video+tv+pbs+system: filetype:mov

Just something I've found useful.

Daniel James

IMO, the best podcasting "hack" that I have found is using del.icio.us to find, create, and maintain simple podcasts. Just use the tag "system:filetype:mp3" to find only MP3s. (Hint, it also works for other filetypes.)

All recent MP3s: http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/system:filetype:mp3

All popular MP3s: http://del.icio.us/rss/popular/system:filetype:mp3

An example of my own podcast: http://del.icio.us/rss/thzinc/voicemail+outgoing+s ystem:filetype:mp3

And an example of a video podcast ;) : http://del.icio.us/rss/thzinc/video+tv+pbs+system: filetype:mov

Just something I've found useful.

Daniel James

IMO, the best podcasting "hack" that I have found is using del.icio.us to find, create, and maintain simple podcasts. Just use the tag "system:filetype:mp3" to find only MP3s. (Hint, it also works for other filetypes.)

All recent MP3s: http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/system:filetype:mp3

All popular MP3s: http://del.icio.us/rss/popular/system:filetype:mp3

An example of my own podcast: http://del.icio.us/rss/thzinc/voicemail+outgoing+s ystem:filetype:mp3

And an example of a video podcast ;) : http://del.icio.us/rss/thzinc/video+tv+pbs+system: filetype:mov

Just something I've found useful.

Daniel James

IMO, the best podcasting "hack" that I have found is using del.icio.us to find, create, and maintain simple podcasts. Just use the tag "system:filetype:mp3" to find only MP3s. (Hint, it also works for other filetypes.)

All recent MP3s: http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/system:filetype:mp3

All popular MP3s: http://del.icio.us/rss/popular/system:filetype:mp3

An example of my own podcast: http://del.icio.us/rss/thzinc/voicemail+outgoing+s ystem:filetype:mp3

And an example of a video podcast ;) : http://del.icio.us/rss/thzinc/video+tv+pbs+system: filetype:mov

Just something I've found useful.

Daniel James

(Palo Alto, CA. - DEVELOPING) The Buttes Foundation, a non-for-profit organization dedicated to empowering tomorrow through trolling today, announced victory over the Flock browser and the piddling company behind it. The announcement took place during a packed session at the Scientology center in Mountain View. Very important Buttes operative rolloffle said he found the air deliciously clear of thetans and other impediments in the pursuit of a good troll.

"Quite simply, Flock sucks," opined Buttes spokesman Khaled to an appreciative audience. "But not only does it suck; it is also a failure", he added to nods of agreement. On the wall was a complicated graph showing blogging activity regarding the dead-on-arrival "Social Browser". Khaled pointed to a sharp color change in the second quadrant which corresponded with the introduction of the Go Flock Yourself weblog, which has been detailing the worthlessness of Flock, its authors, and its fans since shortly after the introduction of the ill-fated application.

"As you can see here," said Khaled, "blogging activity about Flock turned decidedly negative after we began to expose its shortcomings". He then added "we also got Scoble to comment on our blog", pausing a minute before saying "lol". Shouts of "roflmao" and "you da man" erupted spontaneously from the crowd.

Rolloffle took over at that point, elaborating on the negative attention Flock has received, and finishing with Buttes's mea culpa, the eradication of the giant Flock advertisement from wordpress.com's front page. While the administrators of WordPress have not returned requests for comment at this time, it can only be assumed that the Go Flock Yourself blog (proudly featured on the front page since shortly after its inception) has made association with Flock a costly and embarrassing proposition.

During a busy Q&A session, the brainchild behind Go Flock Yourself, a diminutive Canadian who goes by the name "Screaming Eagle USA", offerred to clarify the role of the popular weblog now that Flock has officially failed. "Go Flock Yourself is designed to empower the sarcastic and trollish masses of the internet to drop a big, steaming turd all over Web 2.0 and all of its extravagances." Screaming Eagle displayed a slide of recent posts about say-so, yellowikis, Squidoo, demonstrating a pattern of hard-hitting journalism that leaves no worthless, dollar-stuffed startup with its "perpetual beta" web application untouched. "Our victory over Flock will allow us to leverage all of our core competencies, maximizing ROI across skill domains, in order to architect the synergistic folksonomies that will empower the anti-Web 2.0 revolution."

About Buttes:
The Buttes Foundation is a group of trolls and ne'erdowells that has successfully terrorized the Something Awful forums through its internet terrorist offshoot Team Barry. In recent years, Buttes has expanded the reach of its deadly ruyn-rays to the world's telephone networks and now the blogosphere. More information on Buttes is available at Encyclopedia Dramatica

About Flock:
Flock is an amateurish fork of Firefox which adds various extensions of marginal utility that integrate unaffiliated services (del.icio.us, flickr, etc.) directly into the browsing experience. Flock also includes a substandard blogging tool which even its most diehard users have had a hard time adopting. Flock is currently burning through approximately $1 million of venture capital, after which point it will promptly fold after failing to be at

At least osm is running a Open Source Content Management Systems, Plone. There are a ton of other systems running Plone as well - a list is available del.icio.us

(I think you mean you "couldn't" care less...)

This, though, is what Slashdot could be with some simple training of the editors: a collection of well-chosen articles that is consistently based on a particular range of topics, with well-written summaries. I genuinely don't understand why the editing at /. hasn't improved in the many years of complaints about dupes and bad grammar. Slashdot has gotten into the bad habit of posting "italicized quotations" for the summaries, which specifically prevents the editors from modifying those summaries and doing exactly what the job description entails: editing. Instead of posting rote copy, the editors should be converting the summaries to paraphrased copy with proper grammar, as well as checking for basic errors in facts and interpretations.

Personally, I like the current list that is supplied by the Del.icio.us Popular page. If you're not into things like web design, CSS style, and Web 2.0, it's probably not for you. However, I probably end up visiting 50% of the links that appear on that page simply because the types of people who currently interact with Delicious are just like me. Also, that page doesn't really reward users who contribute to it passively (by saving links on Delicious) since there's no summary to be proud of, or comments to attract attention. It's simply a list of links that are attracting the most attention right now. Eventually even this site will probably succumb to popular interests and become a list of links to ebaum's world, but for now, it's exactly what I want.

http://del.icio.us/ being in production for well over a year ought to provide sufficient prior art...

Tagging spaces (also called 'folksonomies') are interesting for information retrieval where well understood taxonomies (category hierarchies) don't or can't exist.

Tags aren't applicable to Amazon's domain because everyone knows how to categorize consumer products. Everyone knows to walk to the Electronics section in Target to pick up the XBox360.

Nobody goes looking for their XBox 360 in the "blackthings" section or the "overhyped" tagsection.

Leave folksonomies to categorize the web like http://del.icio.us/ photos like http://flickr.com/ or art like http://cafepress.com/

Maybe Amazon and Del.icio.us can get together and agree on a REST API for tags.

A woman in London during the transit bombings went to a public webcam and used her cell phone to report her observations and feelings. She may be the first to step in front of the new mass media, by and for the masses.

I was personally awestruck by how Del.icio.us and Flickr became channels for democratized real time reporting during the London bombings. Bloglines and RSS connected everything seamlessly, essentially turning the entire universe of Blogs into one stream.

Phone cams at one end took pictures from practically everywhere during and after the attacks. Enough people posted pics to http://flickr.com/photos/tags/london to extensively cover what was happening on the ground. Bloggers close to the scene provided ongoing summaries and updates.

As fresh news rushed to the Web from everywhere, http://del.icio.us/tag/london offered real-time-most-recommended links.

A couple of interesting facts: Since Bloglines includes the number of total subscribers to any feed you have subscribed to, you can tell at a glance how popular that feed is. The Flickr and del.icio.us feeds went into the hundreds from only a few subscribers within a couple of hours.

Completely spontaneous emergent mass media, by and for the masses. The digitally connected masses have leached the mass from media, now adjusting to its rightful place as simply another niche. In short, viable grass roots media has arrived.

Flock's bookmark manager takes about 15 seconds to open for me, at least on Mac OS X. I have 1745 bookmarks.

Still my question remains: what's the next big thing for web browsers?

Support for the Semantic web (a.k.a. Web 2.0, a.k.a. web APIs + RSS feeds + other kinds of high-level semantic markup). You can already have a taste for it in projects like Haystack and the Firefox Piggy Bank extension.

The main difference is that future web hypertext content will be less based on the "site" metaphor and more on services like del.icio.us and Flickr, so interface support for interacting with these new information structures is a must.

Keepass is an excellent free, opensource, no-install password/data manager featuring strong crypto. here are a few pointers to USB key-based app collections that I've bookmarked over time.

YouSendIt.com has problems scaling up. You want to use things like Rapidshare.de or similar services, so that thousands and thousands can download the item.

Err... what the crap is it, though?

I just got a fresh hdd and had to reinstall Firefox. And when I was just installing all the extensions I need and half of them didn't yet work with the new version along came the news about Opera being free now and my decision to stick with Opera for a while.

I was a registered Opera user before Firefox came and I never regretted that money (even now Opera is free). For some reasons I had switched to Firefox and kept adding extensions so it would behave like Opera...

"... You are claiming that internet use and open source organization on the net wouldn't have happened without Internet Explorer?! ..."

No but is a pretty good trojan to expand onto the desktop wouldn't you say.

Before Mozilla and WWW in '94 you have to remember the state of MS Windows, V3.x Most Windows based user machines would have an OS without:

*networking (unless you had 3.1)
*tcp/ip stack (unless you used trumpet created by a little tasmanian sw company of same name)
*browser (unless you used mozilla, tulip etc)

I personally see it the other way around (MS gaining more than it gave ~ zero sum gain) with MS gaining a huge technical jolt up the rear.

I still remember with fondness bill.gates trying to run his own little internet - probably called bbb internally, big bad billy or something equally as silly :)

"... You are claiming that internet use and open source organization on the net wouldn't have happened without Internet Explorer?! ..."

No but is a pretty good trojan to expand onto the desktop wouldn't you say.

Before Mozilla and WWW in '94 you have to remember the state of MS Windows, V3.x Most Windows based user machines would have an OS without:

*networking (unless you had 3.1)
*tcp/ip stack (unless you used trumpet created by a little tasmanian sw company of same name)
*browser (unless you used mozilla, tulip etc)

I personally see it the other way around (MS gaining more than it gave ~ zero sum gain) with MS gaining a huge technical jolt up the rear.

I still remember with fondness bill.gates trying to run his own little internet - probably called bbb internally, big bad billy or something equally as silly :)

Read this a while ago... Obviously someone reads http://del.icio.us/popular/

Seriously, this guy has some quite valid points, I've seen corporates install some quite wizz-bang products that are really a P.O.S. and spend amazing amounts of time adminning these things even when a concoction of spamassassin and an AV scanner would have done.

People (especially managers) know one thing above all - do things that will justify your position, make sure you're in control and please god don't let them fire me.

Honestly it makes me sick, those people should be made to work for a living rather than making life hell for those that actually do the work.

ho hum

And then there are the embarrassing dupes and story descriptions that are just blatantly wrong. In a world where everyone and their dog has one or more blogs, Slashdot is quickly becoming irrelevant.

As an aside, I think comment moderation should be done the same was as meta-moderation: You get 10 random comments to moderate on, instead of cherry-picking them.

I usually don't go looking for software that does X, Y or Z because I usually just know. But if I have a need I often just ask people or use google. Also, I lookin Gentoo Portage using the esearch program. 99% of the Linux software you ever want to use is in there.

As for knowing if the software is good or not I run a demo, or I just install it if it's free. If I know what I want it shouldn't take more than the install time plus a few minutes to know if it's good or not. If there is no way to try the software for free, screw it. I wont even consider something I can't try before even knowing if it's what I want.

But most of the time I learn about new software isn't because I go looking for a program with certain features. It's from keeping track of things like del.icio.us pouplar. If there is a new program released that does something cool it will be there.

is it reasonable to expect 100,000,000 non-technical users ...to consistently and correctly enter (and update!) metadata about their files?

To me, they seem to be doing it fairly well.

My wife and I have a business plan for two public service web portals (yeah, with advertisements...): a knowledge intensive recipe/health site (which we already have an early beta for, but I leave out our URL to avoid slashdoting :-)) and a public bulletin board searched by zip code/location.

I subscribe to Business 2.0 (usually has interesting material). I was dissapointed to see our idea in slightly different form in the article - now I will have 10,000 competitors. I did grab a great domain name (http://ourevents.us/ but it will be a couple of months before we have a beta system in place.

I think that with a few exceptions the days of making a lot of money off of web portals is gone. However, by combining personal interests (e.g., both my wife and I love to cook) with low cost deployments of web portals, I think that it is a good business for motivated individuals. The important thing is finding a need and filling it.

I think that the idea behind http://del.icio.us/ is brilliant. I have heard that one guy did this: came up with the idea, implemented it, and I notice fairly frequent enhancements. Very cool.

Alternatively, there's Yahoo MyWeb: http://myweb2.search.yahoo.com/

The advantages are that you get a cached copy of the page to go with the live one, should the site go down or disappear, full text search inside the pages you've saved, and that you don't have to make every page you save publically viewable.

The disadvantages are that it's currently less popular, so finding useful pages other people shared is less effective, and that it's easier to link into del.icio.us (the URLs are simpler, and My Web currently requires a Yahoo ID to use certain features)

Compare:
http://del.icio.us/tag/css
http://myweb2.search.yahoo.com/myweb?ei=UTF-8&dg=6 &tag=css

I typo'd the link above. This is the correct link. I hit preview about 4 times and didn't catch that.

To make matters worse, there appears to be a copycat typosquatter site at the link I put in there. Oh well, if you get all your vital information from Slashdot you deserve what you get :P

Why not try delicious? It allows you to keep your bookmarks online so that they're accessible from multiple locations, while also allowing you to search your bookmarks and those belonging to other people.

If you use Firefox, there are extensions that allow you to view your bookmarks in a sidebar and sync your online bookmarks with your browser bookmarks.

Why not try delicious? It allows you to keep your bookmarks online so that they're accessible from multiple locations, while also allowing you to search your bookmarks and those belonging to other people.

If you use Firefox, there are extensions that allow you to view your bookmarks in a sidebar and sync your online bookmarks with your browser bookmarks.

Raise your hand if you have jettisoned all browser bookmarks and just use http://del.icio.us/ (and/or the wonderful bookmarklets or Firefox plugin for it).

Since we're on the subject of blog aggregation, can someone recomend a GOOD way to aggregate?

Every single RSS aggregator I've come across treats my RSS world similar to an e-mail reader, where each blog is a 'folder' and each entry is equivalent to an e-mail.

This is decidedly NOT what I want and I don't understand why everyone's writing the same thing.

My friend is running PLANET, which builds a frontpage out of the RSS feeds (looks kind of like the slasdot frontpage where adjacent stores come from different sources and are sorted in chronolocial order (newest on top)

PLANET seems to be a server-side implementation. My buddy's running Linux and he made a little page for me but it's not right for me to bug him every time I want to add a feed.

Is there anything like what I want that would run on Windows? And if not, why the heck not?

By the same token, why doesn't del.icio.us have any capacity to know when my links have been updated?

For what it's worth, here's my del.icio.us BLOGS area with some blogs I find good.

http://del.icio.us/eduardopcs/BLOG

I use RSS for all my bookmarks, via del.icio.us. No more need to carry around my Firefox profile to have my bookmarks on me - if I have internet access, I have all my bookmarks.

Fixyourownprinter.com has downloadable technician manuals for just about every printer out there. If you ever have any trouble with your inkjet (ya think?), their manuals will be indispensable.

Found it on del.icio.us/popular a while back.

Since we're on the topic of "start" pages, I thought I would mention my own project, fyuze.com, which was mentioned here on slashdot some time ago. It started out as an RSS aggregator, but in it's latest incarnation is an API aggregator. What does that mean? Well, it means that in addition to pulling RSS/Atom feeds it will also run queries against web-services such as Flickr, Amazon, Technorati, Upcoming.org, and Yahoo (with more to come). It also allows you to post good links directly to your del.icio.us account (hit the settings page).

It doesn't yet sport the nifty Ajax effects of Google and Microsoft, but with prototype and Rico, it is only a matter of time. Anyway, we're trying to push the idea of an aggregator beyond just RSS headlines and weather. So, if you're interested, we'd appreciate it if you gave it try and told us what you thought.

The reason I use it is because it carries my bookmarks / favorites, and other settings (groups, search prefs, etc.) not only from PC to PC, but also from Browser to Browser.

Have you tried http://del.icio.us/? I use the same features and get the added advantage of tags, RSS feed and ability to find similar sites via the tag feature.

And it can be invoked right out of the bookmark bar (on all major browsers via bookmarklets.

The reason I use it is because it carries my bookmarks / favorites, and other settings (groups, search prefs, etc.) not only from PC to PC, but also from Browser to Browser.

Have you tried http://del.icio.us/? I use the same features and get the added advantage of tags, RSS feed and ability to find similar sites via the tag feature.

And it can be invoked right out of the bookmark bar (on all major browsers via bookmarklets.

Google seems positively ancient compared to things like del.icio.us. They better start acquiring fast, or their going to be out of the loop.

As a ready-made alternative, try an AirDesk. They are pricey but well-made.

http://www.airdesks.com/

---

http://del.icio.us/billso

and just use Technorati and del.icio.us and the like to do "blogosphere market research" I could make a mint!

e.

how is this different from wget http://del.icio.us/ | mail me@gmail.com -s "Cool Links".

The solution to this should be obvious: namespaces.

There's no need for a formal "promotion" step. Commands could propogate the same was as del.icio.us bookmarks. Popular ones can collect in the "popular" namespace. If you know someone who creates good commands, you can list or subcribe to what's available in their namespace. If you really like somethiing, you can copy to your own which would bump up its popularity rating.

Here's the documentation for their system if you aren't familiar already.

The solution to this should be obvious: namespaces.

There's no need for a formal "promotion" step. Commands could propogate the same was as del.icio.us bookmarks. Popular ones can collect in the "popular" namespace. If you know someone who creates good commands, you can list or subcribe to what's available in their namespace. If you really like somethiing, you can copy to your own which would bump up its popularity rating.

Here's the documentation for their system if you aren't familiar already.

On the one hand, you trust your friends, so things your friends clicked on might be interesting for you to know about. On the other hand, friendships are not a good predictor for recommendations since your friends often have different interests from you.

One important difference is that Outfoxed doesn't assume that the people feeding you metadata are friends-- that's one reason why I chose the more neutral word informer, which can be a person, organization (example), or even auto-generated list (example).

It's true that you might trust informers in only specific areas. This is partially addressed by tagging. But the bottom line is that Outfoxed only tries to present you with the most relevant metadata for what you're doing, which you can look at or ignore. And all things being equal, a friend is more likely than a stranger to share your values about what constitues good, bad, boring, funny, etc...

But in any case, I'm looking forward to what the slashdot masses think of my project...and to how my ISP holds up.