Yahoo! Sees Del.icio.us Future - Del.icio.usly Interactive
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The del.icio.us home page features a sight that should be familiar to anyone who has been on the Internet for more than thirty seconds -- a search box. When you type a term into the box and hit "search," you receive a set of search results. So far, so good -- but there's an important difference with these results. Each web page that appears in the list of results links to its respective site, as you would expect -- but under the title of each web page appears a list of what del.icio.us refers to as "tags" (more on tags in a minute). Each of these tag words is a link to a list of other URLs that carry the same tag. And, perhaps most indicative of what the site does, next to the list of tags is a number that indicates how many people tagged that URL. You can even click on that number; when you do, you'll see a list that shows who saved the URL, on what date, and under what set of tags.
Currently, there are no sponsored links on del.icio.us. And the number of URLs that come up for a typical search is much lower that Google delivers. In the case of "juggling," for example, del.icio.us returns 451 items, while Google serves up more than six million results. So what a user gets is more focused results -- and better still, none of the results are there because they paid to be there, or because the website's owner made sure to give it enough search engine optimization to please the spiders. Any site on that list is there because a human actually visited the site, looked it over, used it, and decided that the site filled a need (his own or someone else's) and fit a particular category.
As previously mentioned, tags help with this organization process. Tags are one-word descriptors that members of the del.icio.us community assign to their bookmarks. A user can assign as many tags to a bookmark as he or she wants, and is not constrained to assign only particular tags determined by some other authority. The interesting point about tags, of course, is that a lot of people think along the same lines. If you have used the tag word "design" for some sites, and you're curious about what other members have found that might be similar, you can actually view other members bookmarks relating to that topic by going to del.icio.us/tag/design. This can be a lot faster than asking friends for good sites!
Del.icio.us offers other features to help members keep their bookmarks organized, and to provide information to others about the sites they find. Users can send bookmarks to other users with the "for" tag, which encourages interactivity and collaboration. Users can also subscribe to certain tags, certain users' bookmarks, or a user/tag combination; when URLs fitting the subscription criteria are tagged, they are delivered to the user's del.icio.us inbox. Likewise, if there are certain tags you know you do not want to see, you can enter them as "antisocial" in your settings and you will not see them on your home or "for" page; you can also do this with specific users. These may seem like simple features on the surface, but combine them and you suddenly have an immensely useful and powerful community resource -- especially when you multiply that by the 300,000 users and more than 10 million URLs that make up the current knowledge base for del.icio.us.
Next: Will Success Spoil Del.icio.us? >>
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