What's the incentive for me to keep my own bookmarks in del.icio.us?

February 14, 2005 12:06 PM

del.icio.us: am I missing something? (more inside)

I get why it's useful in general, sort of, for finding links related to a certain topic. But what's the incentive for me to keep my own bookmarks in del.icio.us? It seems like I have to go through a slightly-more complicated process to make the bookmarks in the first place, and then instead of being able to directly view & arrange my bookmarks in my browser, and click on them from my toolbar, I have to go to some stupid slow website and scroll through a list. What's the point? Are people actually finding this helpful?

posted by designbot to computers & internet (13 comments total)

Lots of good answers here.
posted by LeeJay at 12:11 PM on February 14, 2005

For the sake of reference, there was a question that was basically "what is the deal with delicious" last month that got many informative responses.
posted by mathowie at 12:12 PM on February 14, 2005

Previously asked and well answered.
posted by CunningLinguist at 12:13 PM on February 14, 2005

Sorry. Would have been nice if that had come up under the searches for "del.icio.us" or "delicious". Should have used the exact search, I guess.
posted by designbot at 12:24 PM on February 14, 2005

Veering even more off topic, I find the "official" search to be more useful than the Google search in AskMe, and oftentimes in MeTa, also.
posted by Plutor at 12:28 PM on February 14, 2005

- It keeps my bookmarks on a website I can access from anywhere, on any computer, on any browser.

- My bookmarks are listed chronologically, so I have a built in timeline of when I discovered sites, when I became interested in a particular subject, etc.

- The bookmarks have tags that I've chosen which sort bookmarks into categories. But each bookmark can have as many tags as I want, so bookmarks aren't locked into a particular category, but multiple ones. Easier to search/find.

- Bookmarks allow short text descriptions to help me remember the context of the link or why I bookmarked it

- The bookmarks show how many other people bookmarked the same link. It's fun to see how popular or unique something you linked to is. You can also see when the link was first bookmarked and how it grew (socially) through time. There is also a "popular" page where you can see what links are appearing a lot.

- These tags are aggregated globally so I can see all of the delicious links on any topic.

- By viewing the set of links of a particular tag, I can find users that post the kinds of links I like. I can also find how other tag words used for a particular topic, helping me find additional links on that topic.

- My friends use the service, so I can see what they've been interested in lately.

- There is an "inbox" function which displays all of the incoming links for a set of tags/users I've chosen. This is the killer feature for many people. It was down for awhile, but it is back up now.

- I can search my own tags or tags for all users, and I can use the "+" symbol to narrow a search.

- A lot of people on delicious are smart. The quality of links are high. Delicious filters the web much better than google because it doesn't try for completeness. Quality over quantity.

- You can go to the delicious homepage and just scan for interesting links of all types. There are so many users now (30K last month) that hitting the refresh button gives you a whole new set of links

- Hackers love delicious so there are new delicious tools coming out every week. The creator of delicious is also constantly improving it.

- It's free. And no ads.
posted by gwint at 12:41 PM on February 14, 2005

I use it because of the portability. When I'm at work, or at a friend's house, if I find something interesting, I post it to del.icio.us, even though it involves visiting the site, logging in, and then filling in some fields. The advantage is that I can go back to it later at any other location.

As a side-effect, I know I might also be helping other people find the same sites if they search for keywords I've entered. I feel like I'm being helpful, even though I don't really know if that's true or not.
posted by odinsdream at 12:56 PM on February 14, 2005

Absolutely Del.icio.us - Complete Tool Collection

Also see the pages about del.icio.us that people are saving on del.icio.us.

Yep. You're missing a lot. Del.icio.us is one of the coolest things on the internets.
posted by spock at 1:30 PM on February 14, 2005

If your weblog is mostly just a collection of links, del.icio.us can be a replacement more people are likely to find useful.
posted by krisjohn at 2:45 PM on February 14, 2005

I tend to want to buy a lot more stuff than I can afford. So I add books and other items to my shopping carts, such as at Amazon. My Amazon UK shopping cart has more than a hundred items, all of which I intend to buy at some point. Unfortunately, Amazon's shopping cart is painful to browse when it reaches that size. Also, Amazon distinguishes between the current cart and items "saved for later", and moving between them is also awkward. There's also no way to move an item from my UK shopping cart to the Amazon.com shopping cart, for example.

Recently, I started tagging items with del.icio.us instead of adding them to the shopping cart. Voilà -- a portable shopping cart.

Since I can get the RSS for a collection of tags, I can now easily have a bookmarklet or script that, given a tag, adds each item (based on its ISBN) to a shopping cart -- any shopping cart, not necessarily Amazon's. It's possible to take it one step further than this and have a script that looks for the cheapest stores based on the items in the RSS. This assumes the URL contains the ISBN or the script can scrape the pages for it, but that's trivial. I haven't done this yet, but that's because I'm not buying that much these days.

Since my portable shopping cart is available for all to see, it doubles as a gift wishlist.

I've started a read list, too.
posted by gentle at 4:51 PM on February 14, 2005

I like keeping track of sites where I leave comments, to see who makes fun of me later.
posted by billsaysthis at 5:32 PM on February 14, 2005

I also use it to keep track of books that I've read. (as opposed to gentle, I think)
posted by dhruva at 6:07 PM on February 14, 2005

dhruva, my "read list" is for books I've read.
posted by gentle at 9:14 PM on February 14, 2005