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."

Comments

It's sad

[Anonymous Coward]

That this is probably the most known site with a .US domain name.

Re:It's sad

[DrEldarion]

At least according to Alexa (which I know can be inaccurate), Imageshack.us is more popular (rank 793 vs 186).

Re:It's sad

[glimmy]

That is probably because no one can remember how to spell del.icio.us

Re:It's sad

[Jugalator]

Or because imageshack is a free host for pr0n ;-)

The future of del.icio.us and flickr at Yahoo!

[Lord Satri]

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.

open source?

[hitchhacker]

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

Re:open source?

[hitchhacker]

de.liro.us seems to have just folded. alternatively, I just ran across scuttle.org which is written in php.
Plus, it appears to support most of the del.icio.us API.

-metric

The benefits of tagging...

[PornMaster]

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.

Re:Site looks pretty plain to me

[micradigitalis]

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.

Have you tried Opera or Konqueror?

[CyricZ]

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.

Re:Site looks pretty plain to me

[ROBOKATZ]

Ah, so, exactly what Yahoo used to be. Ironic, isn't it.

What is the name for these people...

[DogDude]

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?

Re:What is the name for these people...

[generic-man]

The word you're looking for is trendy. There is a subset of the on-line population who absolutely must have the newest stuff. Since everything on the web is being rushed to market before it's scalable (perpetual "beta" periods, invitation-only services, etc) it's trendy to be trendy.

As a fellow former BBSer, I find it best not to take the zealots or anti-zealots too seriously. Yes it's annoying to see ten-year-old technologies like RSS pumped up as the Next Big Thing, but I remember when messages were routed by phone lines during Zone Mail Hour. :)

Re:What is the name for these people...

[Anonymous Coward]

Anybody have any insight, or even a good suggested name for these people?

"p.eop.le"?

Re:What is the name for these people...

[ngunton]

I think you are missing the point by throwing everybody into a big heap and calling it "web 2.0". For a start, the whole Web 2.0 thing is just an attempt by someone to sum up the resurgence of the internet post-dot-bust of 2000. Some thought that the Web would pretty much die away as an exciting medium after that, that the "fad" was over. I think many were secretly glad about the bust, either because they simply didn't understand any of it in the first place, and were jealous about it (or threatened), or else because they simply missed out on all the money sloshing around.

In any case, I personally don't think "Web 2.0" is anything real or substantial as a concept, it's simply the aggregate result of a few websites finding out "what works", in different areas. Google was finally able to demonstrate that you could actually make really interactive web apps that work across different browsers (I had stayed away from Javascript since the mid-90's because nothing seemed to be consistent across IE, Netscape etc, so this really was news to me when I saw Google maps for the first time).

AJAX is just a relatively small, technological thing. But much bigger than AJAX is, in my opinion, the burgeoning realization of the social internet. So why has it happened only now, when the technology to do blogging, tags etc has really been around from the very beginning? Well, I think the answer is that social trends take their own time, they happen on their own schedule. It's like crowd behavior, when everybody in the audience decides to start clapping or stop at the same time - groups have their own intelligence.

Finally, the reason we are only seeing these things now is because it's purely a matter of chance as to how long it takes to find out what works and what just misses the mark. Del.icio.us worked, blink.com didn't. Subtle difference, tags vs folders, but enough. It took years for people to realize what the Web could really be good for... at the start it was cool enough just to have a web page. That took a few years to get over. Then people started obsessing about cool design, then scripting, then eyeballs, then "push technology", then e-commerce... it's all trial and error. Eventually, by chance, someone makes some software that makes it really easy to post daily notes to a web page, and, well, that really worked. I think it's pretty funny that many times, the thing that turns out to "hit the mark" is the one that, before it was a hit, the "experts" would deride as being simplistic or just wrong. How could you trust the general public to write their own tags? How could you trust just *anybody* to edit a web page? Horrors!

Turns out what people really love to do is network and communicate with other people, also to seek group status by their work. People seek tribes, it's a part of our nature. The Web is just currently figuring out how to express this side of our nature in ways that work. For a long time everybody assumed that hierarchical classification schemes developed by experts in back rooms were the way to organize stuff. So this guy who did del.icio.us, almost by chance, comes up with a flat scheme that is totally user-driven... and it works. Kind of like Wikis work, when before, all of our senses would have screamed "No, it can't work! It's anarchy! Vandals will take over!"... and yet, here we are. Open source... works. Wiki... works. Blogging... works. Tagging... works. The common thread between all of these is the social aspect - people working together, interacting and communicating and improving the group as a whole as a result. Shouldn't be all that surprising really, it's how we got where we are today.

So, what to call "these people"? How about just ... people?

Del.icio.us Precursor

[alphaseven]

Here's an interesting blog post by Ari Paparo, who had an idea similar to del.icio.us back in 1999 called blink.com (don't bother going, the site is no longer the same) for people to store their bookmarks online.

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

Managers

[SmallFurryCreature]

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)

Re:Site looks pretty plain to me

[wbren]

I really don't understand all the hype with del.icio.us. The site itself is extremely boring and lacks creativity. It's just a collection of links on various subjects or did I miss something?

You're missing the fact that content is king, not flashy designs. I think the design is clean and functional, as opposed to "boring and lacking creativity". The same goes for digg.com and even slashdot.

Re,di,culo,us

[quokkapox]

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.