Slashdot Mirror
Open Source Social Bookmarking Service
comforteagle writes "This past week I launched an open source social bookmarking competitor to del.icio.us - de.lirio.us. After running it for a while open to the public it appears to be running relatively bug free so this is the invitation to the Slashdot crowd. The code is entirely open and the content is cc licensed, so I'm sure it won't take too long for folks to cook up some additional tools aside from the blogging feature. For those not familiar the meme is social bookmarking, which is basically a service to share bookmarks publicly instead (or in addition to) only within your browser. There are lots of other additional benefits, but that's the gist of it. More details here and here."
So how is this an advantage over del.icio.us, exactly?
I mean, having source code to a del.icio.us like service available is nice, don't get me wrong. But I don't see how it makes del.irio.us itself any better. I'm not going to be upgrading the software on del.irio.us anytime soon.
Aren't you supposed to pay for ads on this site...
Maybe it's just me, that's a possibility, but I don't understand people's fascination with these kinds of services. Blogging, bookmark sharing, it all seems to me like a cry for attention from other people. Blogging looks like it could be fun, but I never participated in it because it always seemed as if no one would ever particularly are about my life, and if they did, it would say more about their life than mine. For the same reason, I probably wouldn't participate in this type of service. I'm not trolling, I simply really do not see the appeal. If I wanted to keep a record of my life, I'd be much more likely to keep a private journal.
I haven't RTFA because letting the entire world know what my bookmarks are, without an option to let the world know what SOME of my bookmarks are doesn't appeal to me.
Now I could modify delirious to have this feature but I don't have enough time and incentive. But something I do find odd are the names. I've always thought the del.ici.ous name was odd, but this is ridiculous. Is there something in social bookmarking that requires things to have periods in the middle of everything? Or is delirious just copying delicious?
By posting here & now you're letting us know your opinion. We read it because we're interested in comparing your views to ours, learning something you know that we don't.
Bloggers are just doing that too, letting anyone interested know what they think or have learnt. Maybe on a more regular basis, in a more defined structure, but it's essentially the same thing.
Isn't this how Yahoo started? For me, at least, Yahoo (the catalog) was like bookmark repository. If I wanted bookmarks to some topic, I searched within Yahoo. Search engines are different because you end up with a bunch of stuff that may be completely inappropriate to the category you're interested in.
What's conceptually new here?
This is a classic example of what may be a valuable application without an accessible interface. You may have some good ideas but the initial presentation of the system and its value and functionality is somewhat uncertain. You can have the best idea in the world, but if you can't present this idea in what's typically coined as an "elevator pitch" you will fail.
I hit the site. I couldn't tell what to do. I generally like the idea of ranking and sharing bookmarks but I couldn't tell how your technology or system had anything to do with it.
Someone else will come along. Maybe with a less capable system, but with a better way of translating and explaining the value of such an application and they will trump you. Sometimes if you're too engrossed into the technical details you can screw yourself over. Either you will adapt quickly, or someone else will take your idea and make it more marketable, but what I see right now won't work.
I can easily make a portal page from del.icio.us, by using the rss feature combined with tags search. I can dynamically query and feed my del.icio.us bookmarks into my blog or webpage info. I can integrate them right into my browser UI with Firefox's "live bookmarks". Compare that to them sitting in a directory, statically, on my home computer.
The days where web apps are tarpits of information are slowly disappearing. Soon, apps will interoperate with each other because it provides a competitive advantage (want to move from livejournal to blogger? Blogger is going to make this as easy as possible for you, and Livejournal provides the interface because people use it for site syndication). Already, data sharing is very easy, and getting easier. It's only a matter of time before the real tipping point happens, and then the real question will be "Who has the best interface for handling my data," instead of "Who will avoid squirreling my data away in a dark hole."
Slashdot. It's Not For Common Sense
When we found a cool site, we didn't just bookmark it, we added it to our personal homepage. Along with something to tell people what that site was, and hopefully we made sensible links.
This is fantasy nostalgia land. 90% of the web was crap then, 90% of the web is crap now. The only reason what you're talking about "worked" then was that that everyone was linking to the same 10% of sites. Then Yahoo came along and everyone just linked to Yahoo.
Around the time that that 10% started to get too big for Yahoo, Google came along and made a hell of a lot easier to find what you wanted out of that 10%. Now, the web has grown and changed so that it's too big and complex even for Google. So people are starting to use other people to help keep that 10% managable.
Too bad Google is repeatedly and regularly fooled. For a bunch of guys that are so goddamn smart, they seem to regularly get taken to task
Have you considered that web searching might be a pretty hard problem? And that spam and SEOs existed long before Google? And that you're completely out of your mind if you think things were better before Google?
Maybe I'm old, but Netscape stored its bookmarks in an HTML file you could regularly FTP up to your homepage, or something similar. Oh, and back in the day, if you had the time, you could update your homepage a lot. That was kinda like what you kids keep telling me is so "revolutionary"- this whole 'web log' thing.
Now you're just being an ass. So the fuck what if you could do the same thing five or ten years ago? It's quicker, easier, and simpler today, and you know what? It turns out that a lot more people actually do it when it's quicker, easier, and simpler. If you think this is a bad thing, you're an elitist prick.
So pardon while I yawn at this service which..um..does what? Let me post my bookmarks? Which I can do already?
You don't actually have any idea what you're talking about, do you? You just read a few comments and all of a sudden thought you knew what it was. And what, really, is your point? Nobody is stopping you from having your fucking FTP'd bookmarks.html. Hell, I encourage it. Meanwhile, the rest of us have found a better way to maintain our bookmarks.
Seriously- the web is supposed to be decentralized.
And it is. It just happens that some nodes are more significant than others. If Google disappeared tomorrow, the web would continue to function with hardly any problems, except perhaps a marked increase in bitching about the lack of a decent search engine.
[I just looked at your post history and it's evident that all you do is complain, so I guess you would be among those.]
superbanana@dodgeit.com
Another option is Scuttle.
One of the reasons I've been wanting to run my own version of del.ico.us is that the site has had quite a bit of downtime and issues with bandwidth. I'd much rather run my own version for myself and perhaps family and friends in order to ensure that we don't lose our data and can access it however/whenever we wish. I'd also like to imrpove upon some of the things that interest me in regards to the interface and such.
And as anyone who's actually used the Open Office spreadsheet can tell you, it's also spot-on true.