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?
Big deal, my copy of Internet Explorer has been sharing my bookmarks with everyone for years. It can even share my passswords, cookies and credit card numbers!
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
taken! (by Davidleeroth) Thanks Bingo Foo!
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.
on the topic of social bookmarking, there are two uses:
1. as one person already mentioned, you can have access to all your bookmarks when you're away from your machine -- without having to carry any removable media with you.
2. since they're categorized, you can find new links to pages on your topic of interest -- links that have been handpicked by humans. it's like an intelligent filter for search engines.
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.
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.
Ok, call me clueless, I've never heard of social-bookmarking, but I faithfully clicked on the link, and it looks like a very cool idea. It could make it easy to find specialty sites. As someone else said, it's like a human-filtered google. But one thing seems to be missing....How do you search?
I'd like to see a list of ALL availiable tags. Or search for tags associated with one of my bookmarks (to try to find similar sites) But I see no such capability. Do you need to login to use it? I looked at del.icio.us, and at least there it appears I may get additional functionality by registering, but I see no point in that. Why force me to register in order to search other people's bookmarks (assuming I need to)?
Or is this is meant by 'cook up additional tools'? Forgive me, but the site layout is atrocious, and it really seems like there is very limited capability to me.
Oh well. Maybe I'm bitching about nothing. Id so, please show me.
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.
Hmmm. The de.lirio.us website is almost identical to the del.icio.us website. I know imitation is the sincerest form of flattery and all, but you'll probably want to change your site design...
What's really amazing is that in the course of copying it, the few things they changed all managed to make it look worse. I guess that's how you tell it's open source.
Don't become a regular here -- you will become retarded.
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.
Several comments above say, "I don't get why it's cool." Here's my take on it:
1: You can access your bookmarks from many computers
2: You can check out the "popular links" on the site to see what's probably going to show up on slashdot tomorrow.
3: You can tag bookmarks with multiple tags, so they can be accessed from multiple folders.
4: Great way to share cool links with a group of friends.
5: Firefox RSS feed of your own bookmarks = totally slick
Of course, it does have problems, too.
1: When the social bookmarking goes down, you've effectively got no bookmarks. (Foxylicious helps, but it can still be annoying when the site goes down.)
2: You can leak information about yourself, and if the URL contains any secret information, you're really screwed.
3: There's no way easy way save a hierarchy and have it integrate into the browser in a slick way.
4: It gets spammed every so often (people trying to get their links onto the popular page, for example)
What's needed is anti-social bookmarking - like a robot that goes through my links and eliminates the ones that aren't necessary.
Great idea - let's call it Bender.
<you> Nice page. *bookmarks*
<Bender> That page sucks. I'm not bookmarking it - I just finished cleaning out all those crappy human porn sites in your bookmarks - not a mechanical babe to be found in there at all. You can bite my XML 1.1 compliant ass.
<you> eep.
Soko
"Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous
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
Bookmarks synchroniser is fantastic. https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php ?application=firefox&version=1.0&os=Windows&catego ry=Bookmarks&numpg=10&id=14
You know what I miss? Leeches.
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
Link to Bookmarks Synchroniser
Requires: Firefox: 1.0PR - 1.0 Bookmarks Synchronizer is a Mozilla Firefox extension that let you connect to an FTP/WebDAV server and synchronize your bookmarks that are stored in an XML file. Setup is easy; just write in your FTP/WebDAV server address, username, password and a name for the XML file
{disclaimer: karma whoring doesn't work anymore, just seeing if mods will think a clickable link is 'worthy' of a mod point, and scry a general consensus on the issue}
{oh, and ph33r my l33t htmlz sk1llz}
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
Note that the Creative Commons button on the de.lirio.us site shows it to be using BY-NC-SA, ie, with the NonCommercial variant.
If I understand correctly, that's not compatible with the GFDL even in spirit, ie, you can't pull de.lirio.us data into Wikipedia. You also couldn't legally put an extract of that data, _or any derivative dataset_, into an RPM package that could be included on any Linux boxed CD set.
Be careful of collaborative projects that use NonCommercial, especially with ShareAlike. It puts a lot of restrictions on what you might want to do later down the track. I don't think it would be worthwhile my contributing to a project like this simply because the licence means the data is useless to me.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC