Del.icio.us, the social bookmark manager
del.icio.us is a social bookmarks manager. It allows you to easily add sites, tag them, and share your collection of links with others.
What makes del.icio.us a social system is its ability to let you see the links that others have collected, as well as showing you who else has bookmarked a specific site. You can also view the links collected by others, and subscribe to the links of people whose lists you find interesting.
I have subscribed to del.icio.us/popular since November 2004.
A few days ago I used a tool called del.icio.us linkbacks to investigate Echo Generation. I was able to find more people that have added Echo Generation to their del.icio.us bookmarks.
There are many del.icio.us tools, linkback is just one example.
del.icio.us is also a subject of recent research on social practices in a distributed classification communities.
Working within the constraints of a very limited data sample, this study attempts to identify some of the information management and meaning construction practices of an online distributed classification (a.k.a. free tagging or ethnoclassification) community. Specifically, this study seeks to investigate the social and communicative practices that emerge when users are encouraged to share web links with one another by using a metadata keyword, or tag, to demark a social group, apart from using other tags to classify links according to an emergent taxonomy.
On April 10th, del.icio.us owner Joshua Schachter announced (via delicious-discuss) that a group of investors has taken a minority stake in del.icio.us. The investment is lead by Union Square Ventures, and the team of investors includes Amazon.com, Marc Andreessen, BV Capital, Esther Dyson, Seth Goldstein, Josh Koppelman, Howard Morgan, Tim O’Reilly, and Bob Young. Joshua will remain in control of the business. He says his first priority is improving reliability and responsiveness, followed by adding new features.
Why I blog this? del.icio.us is simple and effective. While I do not use it to manage my bookmarks at this time, I do benefit from the links others have bookmarked. I will likely use del.icio.us (or a similar service) in the near future. The linkback tool is quite cool too.
