Have a taste for bookmarking tons of Web sites? Del.icio.us can whet that appetite, giving you simple tools to organize those pages, access them later from any Web browser, and share what you save with other users or on your blog. Plus, you can tap into the Del.icio.us community to find sites that other users have saved.
To get started, just visit Del.icio.us to create a free account, verify it, and log in. You can select Del.icio.us's Import/Upload link to copy up to 5MB worth of browser bookmarks to your account. Del.icio.us will translate folder names into tags and can tell if you already have a page bookmarked, so you shouldn't wind up with duplicates. You can add new bookmarks individually within a simple form at Del.icio.us, or drag a bookmarklet to your browser's Bookmarks or Links Toolbar, so that you can click Post To Del.icio.us without leaving the window. Del.icio.us is already baked into the Flock Web browser (still in beta).
Del.icio.us hasn't changed much since Yahoo bought it in 2005, nor has it merged with My Yahoo or integrated with a host of other Yahoo services. The text-and-white-space interface of Del.icio.us remains monochromatic with a touch of blue, which would have looked up-to-date in the last century. The overall lack of design means Del.icio.us loads in a snap, so you don't have to wait for big images to appear if you're stuck with a dial-up connection. However, social search services Wink and StumbleUpon also load quickly while managing to be easier on the eyes. Tiny thumbnail previews of Web pages are a recent interface addition to Del.icio.us. Even more useful, the competing Windows Live Favorites previews bookmarked pages within its interface. Text ads appear within the Del.icio.us site, but they're pretty low-key.
Del.icio.us uses tags, which are subject keywords such as "travel," "chocolate," "ferrets," or whatever other category you create. Each time you save a Del.icio.us page, you can add new tags. If the tag already exists, Del.icio.us will fill in the word as you start to type. In theory, you can search for like content and never need to manually sort your bookmarks, as long as you've attached tags along the way. It's probably a good idea to back up your bookmarks with an HTML document export.
It's easy to see the most recent content and the most popular tags. The top five are usually pretty geeky--design, blog, software, reference, and programming--but they're closely followed by music and art. You can search for more specific subjects. And each saved page will display the number of Del.icio.us users who have also bookmarked it, so you can jump around and peer into other people's preferences.
Plus, you can add Del.icio.us content to your own blog or other Web site as a badge, a link roll, or a list of tags. For the more tech-savvy crowd, Del.icio.us also offers little scripts that let you add MP3 files to a site and so on. And you can allow Del.icio.us to post a daily update of your content to a blog in Movable Type, TypePad, or WordPress. Or you can just choose Network Privacy from the Settings page to keep content to yourself.
Del.icio.us is built to help you share your personal world of information with other Web surfers. However, your profile information is limited to your username and a Web home page, so you'll be judged by the content of your bookmarks, not by the color of an avatar. You can also create a network of fellow users. To find out whenever a Del.icio.us expert on, say, birds adds a bookmark about parrots, you can subscribe to e-mail or RSS updates by tag and by user. We also like that you can specify content rights for your own feed, whether you'd like to reserve all rights to your collection or claim a Creative Commons license.
You can group together related tags with labels and bundles. But we wish Del.icio.us had the intelligence to recognize potentially duplicate tags, especially for those with more than one word. Do a search for "San Francisco," for instance, and you call up 3,753 bookmarks. But look up "Sanfrancisco" (6,325 bookmarks), "Francisco" (16,481), or the dreaded "Frisco" (270), and you get a sense of the challenge. We haven't found a bookmarking site yet that addresses such potential tag overlaps. Should you use the tag "maps" (which has 6,701 bookmarks) or "mapping" (17,000 bookmarks)? Maybe both. If you change your mind, you can rename specific tags at any time. But we couldn't find a way to select a number of bookmarks to delete them at once; instead, we had to erase unwanted items one by one.
Support for Del.icio.us is available online in the form of basic explanations of the features, but you can't search this content. You can send an e-mail message for help. We received a reply within 24 hours. A Yahoo Del.icio.us user group puts you in touch with peers.
If you're in the mood to run into random Web pages, Del.icio.us leaves users to make those connections for each other. There are no Del.icio.us algorithms to attempt to suggest content that might be up your alley, unlike StumbleUpon, which can be more fun for casual browsing. Also, Del.icio.us doesn't function as an RSS newsreader, so if you're more interested in the latest news and blogs, you should check out Digg, Bloglines, or the Technorati blog search. However, Del.icio.us is a solid tool with plenty of features for locating and revisiting interesting Web sites. And due to its loyal user base of early adopters, Del.icio.us contains the biggest pool of users among the ranks of bookmarking services, which leaves more shared content available for you to dig up.
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