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Interview with Joshua Schachter of del.icio.us
prostoalex writes "Joshua Schachter, a Wall Street programmer by day, and a del.icio.us hacker by night, is interviewed by Guardian. The article also provides a little background story on del.icio.us, how it got started, and how Schachter convinced Stewart Butterfield of Flickr to add tagging to the photo sharing site. Both del.icio.us and Flickr are currently members of the Yahoo! family."
That this is probably the most known site with a .US domain name.
They mention about server trouble, but I've never managed to get it working with my browser - the URL looks like it might be the cause of the trouble. Perhaps it's my work firewall or something? What's wrong with www.whatever.com?
Flickr and del.ici.us have a bright future at Yahoo! With the convergence of technologies and the explosion of geospatial technologies, expect a lot in the coming years. To keep myself on-topic, here's some links about flickr and del.icio.us
To start with flickr, it could/will be integrated with Yahoo! Maps (review):
http://maps.yahoo.com/
Right now, we already have a similar tool, named flickrmap:
http://www.flickrmap.com/
As for del.icio.us, combine it with, again, Yahoo! Maps, you get something close to social mapping, which you get with Platial:
http://www.platial.com/
That's only a start. We'll get more. And there's a lot of competition: Yahoo!, Google, Microsoft (and even Amazon with their mapping service) all want a piece of our mindshare. Competition mean, probably, we'll get better consumer-level tools (of course, there's a price tag, but that's another story).
To get back on-topic, my hopes are we'll see more open source flickr and del.icio.us projets. Take a look at Firefox extensions, you'll find del.icio.us wannabes. We're living in an interesting time...
Oh, yeah, my shameless plug... if geospatial technologies is within your interests, which includes mapping in general, take a look at the link in my signature.
Animoog.org
I was about to say the same about /.
If you're using it read-only, it's pretty much just a collection of links on various subjects.
Did you happen to notice that it's read/write, though? That's really the whole point for a lot of folks; it's a way to store interesting links without having to have 1,000 bookmarks in their browswer's menu.
there's more than one way to do me.
I don't think the source code to del.icio.us is open. This is why I use de.lirio.us instead, which uses Rubric: "a notes and bookmarks manager with tagging."
-metric
The benefits of tagging for a company like Yahoo come from the ability to use the tagging to derive the meaning of a page. Tagging will help Yahoo refine Yahoo search results and also suggest similar sites. The problem with it is that it's really got to be protected from abuse, or like meta keywords in the page, it'll be abused to the point where it's not reliable for anything, and will be largely ignored.
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
That's probably the way that Yahoo see Chinamen.
(Have we had any "In Yahoo the searchers come to yoo!" type humour yet?)
You missed something.
The site is incredibly useful--think of it as a searchable collection of human-filtered and categorized web sites. I often use it when search results from Google and other search engines aren't quite giving me what I'm looking for.
It has always worked fine for me using Opera and Konqueror. The only times I have run into problems is when I've been using Firefox, both 1.0.x and 1.5. I haven't tried Seamonkey, but I suspect that it may not work either, if recent versions of Firefox fail to work.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Ah, so, exactly what Yahoo used to be. Ironic, isn't it.
Has anybody invented a name yet, for the "web 2.0" types of people who are obsessed with every new silly fad, like blogs, flicker, delicious, myspace, etc.? There's a whole lot of those (you) people out there, and I just don't get it. Not only are there a lot of people into this stuff, but some are even militant about it, from what I can tell (ie: Don't make fun of blogging! It's better than journalism)
I've been online since the BBS days, and I've kept up with all of the new changes, ideas (hell, protocols, even), but this "social" stuff seems (to me) to be nothing more than personal narcicism, magnified millions of times over, combined with a desperate, almost pathteic need to connect with other personalities in order to fill a massive void in their own personal lives combined with a total lack of any kind of academic discipline (it seems that more than half of the people who write online are functionally illiterate). Is it just me? Am I the last one alive with his own brain after the Body Snatchers came through?
Anybody have any insight, or even a good suggested name for these people?
I don't respond to AC's.
What I find fascinating is even with 13 million dollars of investment and lots of publicity and technical know how behind it, del.icio.us succeeded and blink.com failed pretty much because of one simple thing, it used tags instead of folders. This reminds me of Malcolm Gladwell's (The Tipping Point) observation that the difference between being accepted or not can often rest on a very narrow detail.
It can't be understated how much easier it is organizing stuff using tags, the folders within folders practice is useful for some types of data, but it becomes quite unwieldly quickly for things like photos and bookmarks.
Ari Paparo Dot Com : Getting It Right
Ah yes, the days of the BBS. For you younger people who might have heard of the internet bubble, the BBS was sorta what was before. It was an internet where you had to dial in to a website rather then all the websites being together on one big net. Oh it was more complex then that but I don't want to give you nightmares.
One thing however that was the same was that I saw countless articles and tv shows about how companies needed a BBS to stay in business. Just like every company needed a website. Or a fax.
It really isn't that complex, any new tech needs to be sold so marketting comes up with reasons and sales people tell them to managers and managers lap it up. Or something.
This "social" thing ain't new. It just used to be your personal homespace on geocities but that failed so now it is your blog on myspace because that is better.
Just like BBS sorta changed to websites, personal homepages changed to blogs. And just like some people have always shared their bookmarks this site is just a bit like it.
Will it chance things? Well is slashdot a "social" way to share your links to intresting sites?
It just doesn't sell headlines when you tell the truth and go "sorta new site does something that someone else already does but does it slightly better according to some but with half the uptime".
Doesn't fit and people get bored. Better to claim the revolution is here! (Down nintendo fans)
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
-William Brendel
In the Y! family, along with flickr mapping, I forgot Yahoo Messenger contacts mapping as a future feature. I'm not telling you this out of the blue... you can alraedy do this with Jabber contacts. The story will be out tomorrow on slashgeo.org, but I know /. readers can't wait, so here it is:
Ogle Earth discuss Talk Maps, a site to map instant messaging contacts (Jabber network, including Google Talk) to Google Maps or even Google Earth. From the blog: "You add a bot to your friends list, so that it knows when you are available, and you also enter your coordinates on a special form once. Bingo, yet another way to meet new people from all over the world."
Animoog.org
Since its launch, and especially during the latest six months or so, the site has been growing at a great pace - exponential growth is actually an apt term.
During the past six months they've had a few server switches and almost constant rejiggering, and they're just settling in with a new bunch of servers, partly because of hardware failure. My assessment of the whole deal is that poor programming, actual scalability or design hasn't been the problem as much as growing pains (more users AND abusers like moronic spiders clogging bandwidth and stealing capacity), power outages and hardware just flat out not working. Although I don't rely on their service myself or use it more than, say, once quarterly, they're a competent bunch, and I fully trust that it will all work itself out in the end.
Delicious: the only site I've had to explicitly bookmark because "delicious" is one of the few English words whose spelling I cannot seem to commit to memory, and even if I could, I'd never remember where to put the frickin dots.
it's a blue bright blue Saturday hey hey
I've been wanting to try delicious for a few months now, but they STILL havn't fixed their import feature. I've been building my link collection for 10 years now, I'm hardly going to throw it away and start again at delicious unless I can import my old stuff.
Come on delicious, get your import working already.
Isn't it like the most obvious idea? How else would you categorise any kind of data? And it's also obvious that information can belong to several categories at the same time. Hasn't this been going on since even before the invention of computers (libraries labeling their collection etc.)?
So the delicious guy became popular with it, but I don't think that's because he invented "tagging". Not that it matters, but the hyping tone of the article just annoyed me.
Besides, I am curious if del.icio.us will really be usueful one day. A tag like "funny" isn't going to help much in the long run... Also, there were other bookmark collecting web pages before. The unsovled problem of the whole idea is the privacy issues. But I learn from that example that it might not be worth worrying about that anyway.
This BBS stuff seems (to me) to be nothing more than personal narcicism, magnified millions of times over, combined with a desperate, almost patheic need to connect with other personalities in order to fill a massive void in their own personal lives.
Trendy, is what I'd call it. Why use a BBS when you can just pick up the goddamn phone or mail someone.
it's a blue bright blue Saturday hey hey
Nippies?
it's a blue bright blue Saturday hey hey
Isn't del.icio.us the same thing as backflip.com. They both do bookmarking, what's the difference?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Or maybe I'm missing something, but I like to store my bookmarks in multiply nested folders. Yahoo, Google, del.ici.us (or however you spell it) only let you catagorize things one level down. You can tag a link as 'funny' or put it in the 'funny' folder, but if you have 20 'funny' links, you can't split them into say, 'visit daily' and 'visit weekly', or 'political' and 'general' or 'cartoons' and 'satire'.
So I wrote my own. Ajaxed. You can re-arrange by dragging folders into folder to your heart's content. You can share some sets with other people, and keep some sets private. You can even make sets editable by other people. I'm working on import/export.
I'm just waiting for someone to offer me $30m for it.
And no, it would NOT survive a slashdot.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Digg and Slashdot aren't about content, they're about community and discussion. People don't visit either site to get the news they visit them to share their opinions, witty remarks, trollisms or commentary. Del.icio.us isn't about content either, it's about taking a feature that's built into most browsers called "favourites" and hyping it up like it's something new. Sharing favourites has been around as long as the commercial internet, email and MSN Messenger. The only 'new' aspect with del.icio.us is that you're sharing favourites with people you don't know. Except that's the same as the millions of sites that have a page full of links the author cares about. I guess the only thing new with deli.icio.us after all is it shows the .us domain wasn't a one-hit wonder (imageshack). Only 8 more .us sites need to "make it" and there'll be enough for a top 10!
Just because it's fun, this seems like a good time to remember the worst slashdot post ever:
m l
,and maybe synonym control when the federation appears. Tag, you're it!"
http://slashdot.org/articles/05/01/04/0117245.sht
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Folksonomies In Del.icio.us and Flickr
Posted by timothy on Tue Jan 04, '05 07:52 AM
Ian@falsepositives.com writes "Lots of discussion going on about 'folksonomies' -- bottom-up taxonomies that people create on their own -- as used in Del.icio.us and Flickr: Adam Mathes has a thesis on Folksonomies; IFTF's Future Now makes a point about problems with folksonomies: no synonym control ( "mac" and "macintosh" on Del.icio.us); no hierarchy and content types; and only simple one-word tags. Joho the Blog notices a discussion about what to call it in Mob indexing? Folk categorization? Social tagging?, and John Battelle links into Taggle and "federated tagging". I wonder if a Google Suggest like system might reduce 'lazy tagging'
-=-=-
Gradually this will make more sense to people, but at the time it was referred to as "like reading the mental vomit of an ADD kid".
The real power of delicious is that they allow you to get your tags back in a multitude of ways - HTML, RSS and JSON. This means you can integrate your tags into your content to create a better browsing experience. (JSON is also the preferred data interchange method for Yahoo.)
Delicious also allow you to tap into the "hive mind" by using a generic mode whereby you can see tags/URLs for all users, not just your own account. Somewhat perversely, Joshua announced that they have stopped supporting this mode with JSON - leaving only RSS. In fact, Joshua stated that the /json/tag/* was just an "accident" in the first place!
Anyone got any theories as to why that is? Why publish "socialised content" as (much heavier) RSS feeds but disallow lightweight JSON feeds? Is it to drive users to Yahoo? Or stop third party searches and other add-ons? Maybe it's the more prosaic "we forgot to put it in the specs, now we can't be arsed supporting it 'cause it's someone else's baby now."
That's linear growth! I'm ashamed of you!
sig?
I remember when I first read that, and all the awesome comments that followed. I know that people usually have a short-term memory, but I honestly believe that was the worst (i.e. least front-page-worthy) article ever posted on Slashdot. Thank you for reminding me just how awful it was. Let us hope something like that never happens again.
That so exquisitely and precisely misses the point (Yahoo's destined-to-failure top-down hierarchy and the self-directed utility of tagging) that it should be bronzed. Yahoo used to be that when the web was small, tagging makes that when the web gets larger. Tags get better with scale, Yahoo got worse. That's the whole POINT of all these little pieces of informal metadata.
When I first came across delicious, I didn't get it either. So what if it keeps my bookmarks? But now I see it differently. It's a great resource for finding sites that other people have found useful.
/ which I have been using as much as Google when I want to see sites that people trust.
As an example... the other day one of my users asked me if I knew of a good place to get fonts. She said that a lot of the sites she had gone to had all sorts of pop-ups, and some had even put adware in with the supposedly free fonts.
I had no idea where to tell her to go, so I did what I always do and searched Google. The top few results were rather questionable, and I didn't feel comfortable telling her to got to them.
So I went to delicious, and type the URL for the tag "font", and then selected the most popular sites with that tag: http://del.icio.us/popular/font. This gave me a list of sites, some which had over 3,000 other people tag them. I showed her what I was doing to find the sites, and we both felt like if that many other people found the site useful, then it was probably a safe site to check out.
On the same lines, there's a great delicious search engine here: http://collabrank.web.cse.unsw.edu.au/del.icio.us
What an ass
check out the values on the x-axis, the graph is in logarithmic scale.
No, look at the scale of the chart.
I dind't surf the internet from more than one computer back in 1999! I didn't need the service!
You may have missed it, but what made the yahoo directory especially useful was that it isn't a strict top-down hierarchy. Yes, it is arranged as a hierarchy, but there are cross-links all over the place - for example, a category such as computer games can be found both under computers, and under recreation. Thus, in order to find something, you can pretty much follow the hierarchy in the way that first occurs to you, no need to make hard choices between related subcategories.
Its called AJAX and its not just some technology that script kiddies use. It is a USEFUL technology that allows us to get information from a server without needing to reload the page. Now while this is not a complete definition of it, it covers a lot of what AJAX is for. You CAN however group all of the people who have little clocks made of text that follow you cursor around, as script kiddies. The tasteful use of AJAX and Javascript (thats repetitive) can make a site more appealing to the end user. Sites like http://meebo.com/ use AJAX to create a never before seen product.
I've programmed something similar where you can have nested bookmarks, set them private or not, add keywords, etc. But the killer feature is that you can specify how often you want to visit a link (e.g. every 30 days or once a day) and prioritize this list of links which are due to be visited. This is accomplished by giving each link an "Ascent Speed" value, which determines how quick the link will travel to the top of the list. So each link has an "urgency value" which you get by multiplying "how long is this link due to be visited" and "how important is this link to me". This system works quite well if you have hundreds of bookmarks like me. It makes sure you never miss a link and you visit them in a prioritized way. See http://www.bookmark-manager.com/
I stand corrected.
sig?
Well, they should change the blue text on pink background (the one that says how many people have bookmarked a certain link)...
Translated from jerk:
/translation
There's nothing wrong with the URL. It's probably a browser issue; try Firefox, and if that doesn't work try Opera. If politics.slashdot.org works, del.icio.us should work, too.
Firewalls *can* filter by URL. I suppose the device that does it may not *technically* be considered a firewall, but we have filters here (school district) that block a number of strings in the URL (nude, for example), as well as specific URLs (www.ebay.com) AND IP addresses. That way things are blocked such as a Google image search or sites that change hosts and their IPs along with them.
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
You're an idiot... RTFA - social bookmarking with a variety of interfaces RESTful, JSON, etc, blah fucking blah blah - the reason Yahoo! paid XX million for it had zero to do with AJAX.