Last year, Joshua Schachter raised some eyebrows when he announced that del.icio.us would be adding enhanced social features. This announcement generated some pushback, and I haven’t noticed much work towards integrating meaningful social tools in the meantime. Ultimately, this is dissapointing, because the integration of better social tools in delicious is a good idea, and without these tools, del.icio.us is comprimising its value significantly.
When we first started bookmarking links in del.icio.us, the notion of transportable, social, rss-able bookmarks was a great concept. It remains a great concept, and del.icio.us’ growth is evidence of the strategy’s value. Del.icio.us’ UI also appealed to many – it was fast, stripped down and eminently usable. Schachter had elected to design with an eye towards utility, not Web 2.0 fluff. This design reduced complexity and barriers to entry; combined with its core value, del.icio.us had all the right stuff to really take off.
And take off it did. The acquisition of del.icio.us by Yahoo (along with the acquisition of Flickr) proved to be one of the best marketing moves Yahoo has made in the past few years. In the wake of the acquisition, more people joined, the networks grew stronger, and the value of the bookmarks stored in del.icio.us grew exponentially.
Social bookmarking is a cool idea. If you follow del.icio.us/popular, you can see bookmarks that lots of people like. In doing so, you can spend lots of time reading top ten lists ad nauseam. This is the crowdsourcing model, the Digg model, whatever you want to call it. It flies in the face of editorship and control, and is one of the key concepts of Web 2.0. Unfortunately, del.icio.us has overinvested in the crowdsourcing concept. In fact, I’d argue that the key value of del.icio.us is editorship, a value that seems to fly in the face of Web 2.0.
What is del.icio.us other than an editorial tool? Each person that uses del.icio.us is slicing up the web it their own special way. And as millions of people have flocked to del.icio.us, its userbase has grown to include academics, experts, notables and laymen alike. And the slices of the web created by these people are all potentially valuable to someone else.
If you look at my network, you’ll see a list of people who I follow, as well as a list of people who follow me. I follow a small collection of friends, academics and industry experts. You’ll notice that I only follow about 15 people (on average) – the reason I do so is because that’s about all the people I can meaningfully follow in the current state of del.icio.us networks. In my opinion, there’s a lot of work del.icio.us could endeavor to make the editorial aspects of the service (the true long-tail value) more usable. Here’s a start:
- Make people findable. Currently, del.icio.us offers you a single field that you can use to tell others who you are. You can basically offer a link to your blog or website, that’s it. This is terribly inefficient. Give people fields to describe their interests, occupation, areas of expertise. Make it searchable! If I want to find people who bookmark in the social networking field, let me search for people who describe themselves thusly. I’ll look over their bookmarks and decide if I want to follow them. Don’t make me use Google to find danah boyd’s bookmarks!
- Enable people browsing. I want to know who is bookmarking or tagging stuff in a way similar to my own. If delicious would compute some rudimentary similarity metrics, I’d be able to find other people that share my interests. I want to know who these people are! I want to follow their bookmarks because doing so makes my life easier. Give me the tools so I can better find people who are like me, or who are popular for a certain topic area, or who are widely followed. People follow danah or Howard Rheingold or Fred Wilson for a reason – so make it easier for people to find these luminaries.
- Improve the social UI. As I previously mentioned, I can only follow the bookmarks of around 15 people. Any more than that and I can’t keep track of what’s what. I wrote in to Yahoo some months back suggeesting that they set a cookie that would tell me what links are new when I refresh the network page – that’s a start. The social interface needs work – I should be able to follow groups of people, specific tags individuals use, and so on. The UI is a key limitation to the entire social strategy.
As it stands, the fact that del.icio.us overlooks the value of the individual is a key structural hole in the service. Del.icio.us is populated by many brilliant minds, but they are simply too hard to find! Its almost as if everyone on del.icio.us is blogging anonymously. It might have made sense a few years ago, but it doesn’t anymore. Del.icio.us can improve the social aspects of the service without becoming another social network; the idea that adding social to del.icio.us is somehow a negative is completely bunk. Social can be added well, and it will make del.icio.us even more popular. It’s time for del.icio.us to realize the value of editorship.
Tags: cognition, Del.icio.us, hci, networks
I agree on every point.
Some of these will be fixed in Delicious 2 (although that is largely aimed at restructuring the backend architecture and some UI reimplementation to make our development cycles faster) but we have something aimed at every issue you raise.
Joshua Schachter
del.icio.us/joshua
Joshua,
Thanks! That’s great to know. Keep up the great work.