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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.
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
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 invented a new HTML tag that you can use to tag your own web pages! Here's an example:
/>
<meta name="keywords" content="rss,web 2.0,opml,javascript,ajax,css"
I hope all the popular search engines like HotBot pick it up soon.
For more information, click here.
Apparently not, according to the observational evidence.
And I think you missed the folksonomy angle with your library analogy (not to mention that books can only sit on one shelf at a time).
"Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something" - Plato
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
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
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/