Delirious with del.icio.us

Never should have gotten started with this today... it's totally addictive. Click on this link http://del.icio.us/wordbiz and you'll see the beginnings of my social bookmarking (which is part of the social networking phenomenon). Sarah Lewis turned me on to this (thanks Sarah!) and now I can't stop. In a nutshell, del.icio.us lets you do three things:

1. Quickly tag, annotate and save links you want to refer to later.

Rather than sending emails to yourself (am I the only one who does this??) or struggling with an endlessly long bookmarks folder in your browser, you can use del.icio.us to organize your links. Normally, you can only find your browser bookmarks on your own computer, of course. With del.icio.us, you can log in from anywhere and see your own bookmarked pages. You tag (i.e. assign keywords) and annotate them so you (and anyone else) can see why you bookmarked them. It's totally cool.

2. Enable  others to see what links you find significant and how you've tagged them.

I.e. see http://del.icio.us/wordbiz  Note the tiny pink highlighted link under "Blogs Will Change Your Business." As I write, 161 other people have linked to this Business Week (May 3, 2005) cover story. That number will probably be higher by the time you read this.

3. Search on tags (think of them as keywords) you're seeking information about.

For example, click on  http://del.icio.us/tag/corporate+blogging  Now you see what everyone else interested in this topic has linked to.

BONUS: Subscribe via RSS

Of course, you can subscribe via RSS to anyone else's list of tags... or your own for that matter. Or on a category (like business+blogging) that you're interested in.

Just set up a free del.icio.us account and you're ready to rip... but beware if you have a deadline for something else.

And whence the name del.icio.us?
Oh, and do you get it about the name "delicious"? The folks behind this service wanted a URL that spells out an easy-to-remember (and fun, like google) word. So... they chose a .us domain extension. And set up "del." as the subdomain. Clever branding, huh?!

Addendum
Forgot to mention. Flickr (acquired in March 2005 by Yahoo) does the same thing for photos that del.icio.us does for links.

Comments

[Lucky Balaraman]

Debbie, isn't Delicious very similar to Furl??

Cheers

Lucky

[Walt Campbell]

Regarding the question about Del.icio.us being similar to Furl, they seem to me very different, albeit equally useful, creatures. Furl lets you archive Web pages; instead of downloading a copy of the page to your computer, your store it in your Furl account.

In one sense, Furl is similar to del.icio.us; both make use of tags/keywords when storing content. The difference is in the type of content stored: with Furl, you store Web pages; with del.icio.us, bookmarks.

At least that's been my experience. I'd be interested to know whether there are further similarities that I haven't discovered yet.

Walt

PS: I, too, have a blogger to thank for turning me onto both services. They were mentioned in a recent post on Amy Gahran's blog Contentious (http://blog.contentious.com/).