Greggman (and a few others) have asked why I like delicious over furl.net. It’s a valid question and one that is worth answering.

Essentially it’s because of:

  • users
  • transparency
  • community
  • extensibility

USERS: delicious, due to it’s nature, has one of the most interesting user-bases on the ‘net at the moment. I think it’s safe to say that Flickr and delicious are the two services-of-the-moment, and thus there’s a lot of new users and lots of energy near these communities.

TRANSPARENCY: Delicious is very transparent in the sense that it is a project run by Joshua. It is not a business, and the service is free for users. There’s no promises for anything, etc. In that sense, it’s a benevolent dictatorship, much like Metafilter is. Furl has an onerous “Privacy Policy” that I’m not going to deal with anymore.

COMMUNITY: Joshua hosts a vibrant and interesting mailing list at delicious-discuss. Furl has none of this kind of open-discussion. Of course Joshua has the final word on what happens, but he is hosting this service and provides the discussion space, and is open to requests. It’s a good place to mention any bugs too.

EXTENSIBILTY: This is a big one. Delicious has an API which allows for all of these add-ons, plug-ins, visualizations, etc. Furl has none of this. Delicious also spits out more RSS than just about any other site I know. Almost every single Delicious page has an associated RSS feed. It’s impressive.

Here’s an incomplete list of all the cool ways others have used the delicious API:

I do think it’s easy to overlook the what makes delicious interesting. I’ve heard and read from a number of folks that, “I’ve tried it but didn’t know what was so cool about it.” The key to delicious, of course, is that once you start tagging your URLs, you can get more out of delicious than what you put in to delicious, which is what makes it really interesting. Humans are suckers for getting more out than what you put in, and delicious meets and exceeds that goal. Between the plug-ins, the community, and the users, it’s clear that delicious is where you want to be storing your URLs and checking out what other URLs people are saving.