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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.
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
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.
It goes;
"In internet China Yahoo arrests yoo!"
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
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
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!
I may be missing something, but isn't what you're talking about already possible, and perhaps even better implemented, with Google and del.icio.us? Just throw multiple tags at something - if you want those 20 'funny' links to be further subdivided into 'visit daily', etc - just throw another tag at them. Then, if you want to see all your 'funny visit daily' links, just search for 'funny' AND 'visit daily'.
This has the added benefit of specialization - you don't have to create "visit daily" subfolders for every single top-level folder you have. One of the biggest problems with heirarchical classifcation systems is the "which goes first" puzzle - do you classify things under X>Y or Y>X if you have equally many values for X as you do for Y?
So, it may just be a matter of education people on the best usage of tags rather than trying to invent something new.
> 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'.
Of course you can. You've obviously never used del.icio.us. It's called a "tag intersection." The syntax is simple:
http://del.icio.us/skidooooo/funny+history
Delicious is not the only game in town. Try Simpy, it just got a nice TechCrunch writeup. Has import, export, API, privacy, full-text search, you name it.
Simpy
Well, ignoring the fact that you obviously don't know what I have and have not tried-
:-)
I'm certainly willing to admit that I just haven't wrapped my brain around how to use tagging to do what I want. I like the idea of being able to throw multiple catagories at something, because that is the problem with hierarchies. In real life, things live in multiple places. On the other hand, you have 268 tags. That seems a bit unwieldy. I guess if they're yours, maybe it's different. Cloud view helps too. It all does make more sense when I see someone else's utilization of it.
Um, but what are bundles, if not a one layer of hierarchy? If you have one, why not many? I guess I see definate advantages, but I'm not sure I'm sold yet.
Maybe what we need to add to tagging is meta-tagging
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."
I wish someone would add this sort of functionality to my computers filing system. Most people don't know s**t about computers. They don't want to and they shouldn't have to.
Why can't my mum hit save *and not know where the file went?* All she needs to do is retrieve the file when she needs it - and what better than an intelligent tagging system? It sure beats a heirarchy where, as you say, things live should live in multiple places at the same time.
Apple's spotlight automatically adds all the words in a document to it's engine - a kind of tagging on steriods. While it may miss the *meaning* of a document, it does capture the content. Do we go this way, or let the users assign their own keywords? Or do we do both?
Del.icio.us adds another layer by linking the tags/keywords together. This could be used in any social grouping - family, work, town, city, country, whatever. Natural, socially meaningful taxonomies arise from these systems and are incredibly valuable because of it.
I don't make predictions, and I never will.
That's linear growth! I'm ashamed of you!
sig?
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
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!
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?
One of the biggest problems with heirarchical classifcation systems is the "which goes first" puzzle - do you classify things under X>Y or Y>X if you have equally many values for X as you do for Y?
If you use the delicious bookmark plugin (I forget the name), it handles this in an intersting way. Lets say you file a link under "funny" and "daily" tags. It allows you to access it through any combination of the tags. "funny > link", "funny > daily > link", "daily > link", or any other possible combination.
The same is true if you file it under three or more, you could acces it through "funny > link", "funny > pictures > link", "funny > pictures > daily > link", or any other combination of the tags.
This has the advantage of being able to access it by whatever you're thinking about. Whether you're thinking "what was that funny site I used to look at?" or "what was that site with images that I used to go to?" you'll be able to find your link.
I would be interested in seeing this bookmark website of yours; I am working on my own that currently allows both (wow, you don't have to be exclusive) tagging and strict hierarchies. Not only this, but one bookmark could go in multiple categories, so you'd get the benfit of tagging with the structure of hierarchies. Like you, mine would not surivive /.ing, as there are only a few users right now. Drop me a line at labreuer+slashdot@gmail.com if you're interested.
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.
The feature most sites are missing is synchronizing the IE,Firefox and Opera bookmarks with the server. Any site offering this would be a killer. linkagogo.com is one such site but sucks because of its interface
Cheers!! Abdul Aziz