For those who did not experience it, del.icio.us was a bookmarking service, and one of the first to have "tags", but also had a sense of fresh discovery. You can bookmark and tag your sites. But you can also browse the bookmarks and tags of people you know, and people they know, getting deeper, freed from algorithmic manipulation. Like Wikipedia, but you start at you.
Delicious, Digg, StumbledUpon and slashdot were my main fresh content feed back in the days, found so many useful articles and fun websites through them...
At some point I started searching directly in del.icio.us over google because it would give me higher quality results. I guess someone bookmarking a site was proof enough it was useful.
Sadly that never lasts for long. Fake users trickle in, exploitative bookmarks get added, then it all goes to shit, much like the search-driven web did in general.
100%. Loved how anything you could reach navigating it with a browser could also be exported to RSS. Around 2007 I had kind of my own personal video podcast by subscribing to the del.icio.us video tag on iTunes for example
Was there a way to find people with the same link(s)? I don't think I'm going to get anybody I know starting to use this again, but I'm going to try it out.
Yes you could see who had bookmarked what you had and how many people had bookmarked it.
Every now and then I would take something I had bookmarked that was not widely bookmarked and go through the people who had bookmarked it like me to find relevant stuff under the tag they had bookmarked it. Was a great way to find new content.
Yes I did this too. I found some great links this way. I was crawling a web of links.
Also I bookmarked some random mp3 files and used the same tag for all of them. Then o took the RSS feed for that tag and subscribed to it in iTunes and then I had a custom podcast I could add to anytime just by adding a new bookmark.
i remember writing the code to enable that to happen. only took an afternoon. you could also get an rss feed of EVERYONE's mp3s under a given tag, and have a group podcast feed...
I still haven't found something that is quite as good as delicious was for finding other 'curators' with similar tastes (and then being able to filter what they curated by tag, iirc).
I used Limewire the same way for music - you could browse other sharers directories. I found more off the wall stuff that I liked that otherwise I would have never found. My spending on CDs went up dramatically too (something the music industry swore wouldn’t happen).
Back in 2006 I actually had a moment where I overheard someone at a university talking about an obscure subject (synthetic biology) I had spent the last couple of years saving del.icio.us links about.
We soon had this conversation:
Wait! Are you so-and-so?
Dude, how did you know?
We've been saving all the same links to del.icio.us!
I had just finished a rotation in one of the handful of labs in the world that worked on this subject, and he had arrived to do a junior year summer internship in the same lab. Incidentally we both were led astray, in some sense, by all the Web 2.0 idealism of tools like del.icio.us; neither of us fit in in academic biology. He even took it to the extreme of opening a nonprofit to support DIY, "open source" biology ... (So very late-aughts!)
this is literally the exact same reason delicious had tags.
i had a text file of the format "url #notes\n" and the notes were pretty short. so i'd write "url #wifi #linux" or whatever.
so a friend asked, "have you heard of this wifi thing?" and i said "yes, here's everything i collected" and just did 'grep \#wifi links' and pasted it to him.
this later became tagging in muxway and then delicious.
Hi, my name is Maciej Ceglowski, the latest (and hopefully last) owner of del.icio.us.
The site will be back online soon. If you had data stored on del.icio.us after 2010, you'll be able to export it here.
If you had data on the site before 2010, whether I still have it depends on whether you completed the "opt-in" process in 2011, when Yahoo transferred the site to AVOS.
I'll do my best to get everything I can back online this summer!
They did, and let it rot, before shutting it down. At the time it seemed like a huge waste. But perhaps, if you can escape becoming the yahoo/AOL/etc homepage, you have a chance to live again.
For those who did not experience it, del.icio.us was a bookmarking service, and one of the first to have "tags", but also had a sense of fresh discovery. You can bookmark and tag your sites. But you can also browse the bookmarks and tags of people you know, and people they know, getting deeper, freed from algorithmic manipulation. Like Wikipedia, but you start at you.