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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."
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.
Ah, so, exactly what Yahoo used to be. Ironic, isn't it.
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
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.
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That is probably because no one can remember how to spell del.icio.us
"p.eop.le"?
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.
... people?
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
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.
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