RWT Webmaster Tools Blog

Del.icio.us Review

Del.icio.us is probably the most popular social bookmarking site.

Click on the link to read more about social bookmarking .

The best way to describe del.icio.us is to let it describe itself. From the del.icio.us About page:

» 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.
» Once you’ve registered for the service, you add a simple bookmarklet to your browser (see below). When you find a web page you’d like to add to your list, you simply select the del.icio.us bookmarklet, and you’ll be prompted for a information about the page. You can add descriptive terms to group similar links together, modify the title of the page, and add extended notes for yourself or for others.
» You can access your list of links from any web browser. By default, your links are shown to you in reverse chronological order, with those you’ve added most recently at the top. In addition to viewing by date, you can also view all links in a specific category (you define your own categories as you add the links), or search your links for keywords.
» What makes del.icio.us a social system is its ability to let you see the links that others have collected, as well as showing you who else has bookmarked a specific site. You can also view the links collected by others, and subscribe to the links of people whose lists you find interesting.

Del.icio.us is fairly basic. Second generation social bookmarking sites take the core of del.icio.us and have added a more complete set of features. It will be interesting to see whether del.icio.us will continue to develop a more feature-rich set of options or remain a fairly simple tool.

del.icio.us offers the following fuctionality:

• Viewing bookmarks by tag or cloud
• Viewing bookmarks alphabetically or by frequency
• Viewing bookmarks by tag. Tagging is a much better organizational tool than folders.
• Tag each bookmark with one word descriptions.
• Create bundles or groupings of bookmarks. These bundles can have their own tags.
• Subscribe to particular tags or users. This will create an alert when a new bookmark has been created with that tag or from a particular user.

This feature set is more than enough for the beginning social bookmarker. Since del.icio.us is the most popular social bookmarking site, there are plenty of opportunities to learn about what others are bookmarking.

Viewing a user’s bookmarks is as easy as clicking on their user name. There is no privacy protection on bookmarks. All bookmarks are visible to everybody. This is probably one downside to using del.icio.us. It would be helpful if users had the choice to make a bookmark visible or invisible.