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:
- extisp.icio.us (a delicious tag visualizer)
- post to delicious from NetNewsWire
- Delicious mind map maker
- WordPress + Del.icio.us integration via Magpie
- oishii (popular URLs at delicious)
- cocoal.icio.us (delicious client for Mac OS X)
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.
Well, it's still not quite what I personally want in an online bookmark system but then neither is furl.
I found this link that has a feature comparison
http://www.irox.de/stat-pdf/furlspurldeliciouse.pdf
Okay, so I'm trying it out. Something I personally want that neither Furl or del.icio.us has is heirarchy. I want to be able to have
Code:
Code:C++
Code:C++:STL
Code:C++:Generic Programming
I know I can manually type that in but I'd prefer it just have that interface, at least as an option. Maybe I'll get used to it though.
Otherwise, I wrote some perl to import my links from Furl. I miss the ratings from Furl. If I had 5 links on networking I liked being able to tell which one is most likely to have the answer.
Also, it seems like del.icio.us is really setup to be abused and to have problems. Abuse comes from spammers mis-categorizing things on purpose so their site shows up under any tag. Problems are like having tags for childern's books on under "child book" and someone else having tags for child pr0n under "child pr0n" so that looking for "child" you're going to find things you don't want. I supposed that's no different than google though.
Gen, gman's above comment refelcts a bit of what I was talking about last night. he want's the ability manage his own ontologies, and then have distributed systems like del.icio.us, flickr (and other softwares) interop with these ontologies.
Also, check out ecto's built in del.icio.us support. It's a bit rough (sorry Ado, it is... ;) but cool nonetheless. Best part of it is that Ado goes and fetches your list of del. tags... we just need someone to create a tags manager and have everybody agree on a standard... hell, even use atom why not? ;)
(Sitting in your living room still... ;)
Nice post. I also think having an RSS feed on every single dang page is pretty impressive.
BTW, your link to Cocoal.icio.us is broken because of the extraneous "mailto."
Have you guys tried Spurl? It has the hierarchical organization, tons of feeds, Firefox tools http://spurlbar.mozdev.org/ , link checker, and syncs with your del.icio.us account. www.spurl.net