You’ve probably heard of del.icio.us – if nothing else it’s naming convention spawned imitators (much like the horde of ‘dropped e’ applications post flickr). It is a public bookmarking system that doesn’t use folders (hierarchical) for categorization but multiple tags, or keywords to describe something. This is generally called a folk taxonomy, or folksonomy for short. If you haven’t used it before, you might want to browse around the site for a minute or two, if you are familiar with the program perhaps reading this brief will give you a new idea or two on how to use it.

The basic URL structure of del.icio.us is as follows. To bring up bookmarks for a user (username) with a certain tag (tag_name) you would go to http://del.icio.us/username/tag_name. For ALL bookmarks with that tag, you would go to http://del.icio.us/tag/tag_name. It is a very basic, but convenient system. There are application specific functions as well, such as http://del.icio.us/popular/?new and http://del.icio.us/help/.

Single User Perspective

The core aspect of del.icio.us is that it allows user to store bookmarks in a database that can be accessed by relatively any browser on any OS. The obvious solution here is that you no longer have to worry about synchronizing bookmarks between a desktop at home, desktop at work, a laptop, etc. Beyond this, your bookmarks are accessible anywhere, which makes working off a public terminal at a net café or public library slightly more appealing.

Searching through your bookmarks can be more rewarding than it could traditionally be. Instead of having a general folder/category of “CSS” for example you could try to find something by how you tagged it, say “css_hacks” to bring up more relevant links right off.

Multi-User Perspective

Team members could either monitor each others links (you could create a username for work vs. personal bookmarks) to keep up with relevant articles and information. If they use a RSS reader (feedreader, sharpreader, Google Reader, etc) you can subscribe to a specific users feed. To simplify things a single account could be made for an entire team and members could login and post links to it whenever they run across something deemed worth sharing.

It would be interesting to be able to check what resources other teams across campus in related fields thought were useful for their work. On a side note if your friends ever ask what it is you do at work, directing them to your del.icio.us feed would give them plenty of relevant (if perhaps overly technical) information.

Global Perspective

Instead of skimming a newspaper or browsing google news, you can check popular links (either all of them or just freshly linked ones?) in del.icio.us. While you’ll get banal topics in here, you can search within certain tags… and popularity within tech articles should be a stronger indicator of something being worth reading than entertainment, politics, and such. You could also find specific users with similar interests and taste and benefit from subscribing to or bookmarking their account.

If you are searching for a certain topic it may be more useful to find what others have tagged being useful rather than relying on a search engine’s ranking system.

Benefiting from its Open API

While del.icio.us is closed source (there is an open source clone called de.lirio.us for those interested), it does have an open API. The del.icio.us plug-in on mozdev is a popular solution for creating a more streamlined bookmark creating experience.

There are more creative uses of tapping the API, including a fancier AJAX driven User Interface called del.icio.us direc.tor. It has to be loaded by a Java bookmarklet, but once done so it is pretty impressive. You can try out this static demo to get a feel for how it works. Its main features are listed as being:

  • I-browser handling of del.icio.us bookmarks (tested up to 12,000 records)
  • Find-as-you-type searching of all your bookmarks, with basic search operators
  • Sort by description, tags, or timestamp
  • Ad-hoc tag browser

For fun here are some steps for styling your del.icio.us experience in Firefox 1.5.

In Conclusion

There are certainly many more uses for del.icio.us than mentioned in this article, if you have one you’d like to share feel free to send it in.