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."
Blogs are of some interest to me because I get to see (somewhat) how people's thought processes work that are different from my friends'. (Friends think more or lesslike their friends.) I find them oddly englightening, but of course I don't mean the "I hate my mom I hate my dad I'm gonna cut myself but not die" kind of blogs, but ones that provde actual ideas I wouldn't otherwise hear. Funny blogs or tech related blogs are also interesting.
Joshua Schachter had some great news today, quitting his day job and now committed full time to del.icio.us, with the help of some outside investment.
Is it just me, or can you see spammers hitting these kinda sites soon....
Granted, not everyone would be upset with a flood of porn links... *cough*
But, like any thing that may at some time be 'good', it will go bad.
You will be baked, and there will be cake.
... calm down, this isn't quite the heresy the subject line indicates it to be ;-).
Having an open-source implementation of social bookmarking similar to del.icio.us is nifty, and kudos to the author for writing it. But what does the user actually gain by switching? Del.icio.us already has a web-service API (complete with Python wrapper) and RSS feeds of its data. The above link shows that the development process is already pretty open -- follow it and the links from there to see what people have done with del.icio.us.
Users of the new service will not be able to take advantage of the network effect that del.icio.us already has going for it; given that we're talking about social sites, this is significant. So, to summarize, yay source code, but what is the benefit here?
Friends don't let friends misuse the subjunctive.
The main reason why those services are so useful is bookmark searching. They allow you (at least furl does) to search for keywords within the pages you bookmarked effectively turning it into your "personal Google". It changes the way you work with bookmarks.
As for sharing bookmarks, furl gives you a preference option where you can have all your bookmarks private by default if it bothers you when they are shared.
Your pizza just the way you ought to have it.
Here's a better question. Remember way back in the day, when search engines were kinda finiky? 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. How is this better than that?
Google capitalized on that linking, figuring the more people linked to a page/site, the better it must be. Too bad everyone stopped keeping homepages or publishing their bookmarks. Too bad SEO's, spammers, and bloggers figured out there wasn't much linking going on, so the system would be easily tipped. 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...and what are they doing during this? Goofing off with mapping and social communities and webmail and and and and..basically falling into the same trap Apple did many years ago, the same trap HP fell into a few years ago... Overdiversification.
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.
So pardon while I yawn at this service which..um..does what? Let me post my bookmarks? Which I can do already?
Seriously- the web is supposed to be decentralized. Why do I keep seeing all these people expecting me to put my eggs in their basket? The search engine article earlier today was great- part of the reason Google sucks these days is precisely because we put all our eggs in the Google basket, when there were at least a few other good engines, like Teoma, for example. Google lost the motivation to innovate, because they didn't have to. Frankly, searching these days with Google is like walking down a supermarket baking supplies isle and having people scream at you...and what are those boxes of cereal doing here in the baking supplies?
Please help metamoderate.
Collaborative Aggregation answers an extremely important need: Aggregated web pages form an answer to some research question, be it a one page discussion or the name of a bookmark folder. It is the mechanism of choice for sharing information that is included in more than one web page - contrasted with information that is part of a web page, e.g. how many guns there are in the US, or with information that is *A* web page, e.g. where is the order page for an O'Reilly book.
While StumbleUpon (mentioned above somewhere) is nice, and Amazon has their booklist sharing function (which I'm sure they've patented, *hmpf*), the contender for social bookmarking seems to be Google Answers, from the Expert Sites category. However, rather than cross-referencing and indexing their DB, Google choose to let users mine it with (surprise) a search function, so you need to do some digging if the question is not well-defined and this causes the product to be pretty immature IMHO.
An extension of the concept into Wikipedia would be WikiStrings (suggested name), a group of terms spanning otherwise unrelated topics, plus a text field - the WikiString term - which explains the informational value of packaging the terms together, e.g. "Why Nationality is Stupid WikiString", "Lifestyle Impact of Full-Blown VR WikiString", "Info for Avoiding Media Manipulations WikiString", etc.
In all collab. aggregation is hot. Good luck!!!!!
-Yuval
Tel Aviv