del.icio.us

http://del.icio.us

del.icio.us is a tool to centrally store your bookmarks, written by Joshua Schachter. If that doesn't sound very exciting, think of every feature you would add to make it absolutely fucking great. Chances are, delicious already has it:

• Tagging every bookmark with an arbitrary number of keywords, and displaying bookmarks based on those keywords? Check.
• Bookmarking a site while on the page, through a popup-window, or even through a plugin for your favorite browser? Check.
• Looking at other people's bookmarks based on username or on how they're tagged, and copying them? Check.
• Seeing how many other people have posted the exact same link, quantifiyng your and their (un)originality? Seeing exactly who those people are, and voyeuring on all their other links? Check.
• Seeing a list of the latest links added, and so keeping up with the Joneses, as regards fun or disgusting movies, beheadings and whatnot to show to your coworkers? Check.
• Exporting and importing your bookmarks? Check.
• Pulling an RSS Feed of your latest bookmarks to your own website? Check.
• Minimal Googlicious design? Check.
• Keyword or user based feeds you can subscribe to? Including one filled with e2 goodness to be found at: http://del.icio.us/tag/e2? Check!
  Thanks to Ouroboros for pointing this out.

Really, this is a great idea, worked out very well. It wouldn't surprise me if they get picked up by Google or another big company soon. It has social networking aspects, but the network is actually about stuff. It has blogging aspects, but since a lot of blogs are just collections of links, this takes those kinds of blogs back to their bare essence.

Also, it makes it really, really easy to store your bookmarks, and find them back.

From the site:

» del.icio.us is a social bookmarks manager. It allows you to easily add sites you like to your personal collection of links, to categorize those sites with keywords, and to share your collection not only between your own browsers and machines, but also with others.

Yeah, this is the kind of thing that amuses me.

del.icio.us, a social bookmarking site, looked like the next big thing for some time in the mid-2000s, just before Facebook and Twitter took over. These days, del.icio.us has basically been rendered obsolete through reddit, I guess.

I signed up over there with the same regrettable handle I still use here. In case you are lucky enough to never have witnessed it, RealPlayer was a horrible, horrible software that was inexplicably popular in the early 2000s. The program basically tried to invade your PC with advertisements for the benefit of being able to playback awful-looking, tinny-sounding video content.

Like many others, I stopped using del.icio.us around 2008, when the site was bought by Yahoo, and renamed "delicious". More recently, I became morbidly curious about the snapshot of a previous internet life my old bookmarks would provide me with. But my bookmarks didn't exist anymore.

It had actually happened - Real Networks had taken over my account without notice. And that was literally all they had done; slap their RealPlayer logo on it, and leave an otherwise empty profile. They were too lazy to even bookmark their own website.

So, let me sum this up - an obsolete account on an obsolete website got taken over by an obsolete company to promote their obsolete program, and they didn't even try to make the effort of taking my account look like anything but - you guessed it - obsolete.