Delicious, also known as Del.icio.us, is an early social bookmarking site that has aptured a large membership, which remains very active despite many competitors, such as Reddit and BlogMarks, appearing since it launched in 2003. It provides members a place to save bookmarks with tags that help others find articles of interest by topic and popularity. 

Members use Delicious to filter the Net collaboratively to find interesting reading and for individual reference, keeping a record of their bookmarks that can be organized by subject, as well as accessed from any networked computer. Bookmarks may also be organized into “bundles” that capture several topics for sharing with others. If, for instance, you were working on a school report and wanted to share your research with a writing partner, just share the bundle with them.

The center of Delicious’ community activity is the home page, where popular bookmarks are listed. Beginning here, one can browse through the bookmarks, which are added at a pace of more than 200 new pages an hour. The number of people who have bookmarked each item is listed, providing a quick indication of popularity. A tab at the top of the page switches the list to one of recently added popular tags, giving a topical view of bookmarking activity. 

Drilling down into an individual bookmark link exposes individual members’ bookmarks and tags. For instance, if you click on the tag “chess,” a particular passion of mine, Delicious displays a list of all chess-related bookmarks. It is an easy way to find what people are reading about chess on the Web, and it is

a portal to relationships with those readers. In the screen to the left, for example, there is a list of bookmarks and people who bookmarked pages related to “chess.” By clicking the number above the tag, you can open a list of people using the “chess” bookmark–from there, click on the user’s names to see the catalog of their bookmarks. If they seem interesting, click the “Add to my Network” link on the page to add them to your friend list. Now, you’ll receive alerts on your dashboard about their new bookmarks.

 

Subscribing to a person or tag, as well as to a person AND at a tag so that you receive only bookmarks about topic by a particular individual, is the way to build a personalized view of the Web. One’s subscription page becomes a personalized view of the community’s filtering of all the stuff on the Web. Members can also create subscriptions to tags using RSS feeds to a newsreader on their PC or a Web site, so it is not necessary to return to Delicious to get new bookmarks.

Delicious is well supported by tools (listed here) that integrate the service into your browser or blog. Firefox and Internet Explorer toolbar add-ons let members click a button when visiting any Web page in order to add it, with tags, to their Delicious collection.

Yahoo purchased Delicious in 2005. There is no indication as of this writing that Delicious will be discontinued because of the business problems at Yahoo.

Home Page: Delicious.com 
The pioneering social bookmarking and tagging site.

Free

Tags: bookmarking, friend lists, news filter, raiting

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 18th, 2008 at 6:28 pm and is filed under Social Site Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.