Albert Tanutama

If you’d like to know how social software can make an impact, I believe del.icio.us would be a great example. Now, according to the definition:

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. 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.

The idea of this application as stated above is simple – save your bookmarks on the Web, rather than on your PC. First, delicious makes it simple to save, using bookmarklets. Then you can categorize it using (multiple) tag, much like gmail’s labelling system.

The thing gets really interesting once the system support social connections. Delicious automatically displays new bookmarks at its homepage. It describes who post it, how many people have that item on their list and display it in reverse chronological order.

For the past few days, I managed to find quite a number of interesting new websites. It is easy to take note which sites are popular because delicious highlighted those sites according to the number of people have bookmarked it. Its “copy this item” is quite useful despite I usually launched the site and use my post bookmarklet once I’ve verified its quality. It is also interesting to note that we can click to see people who have bookmarked that particular item because we might share common interest. I could see their bookmark items, and might even more interesting websites. I could also learned their bookmark categorization system. It seems that delicious could have come out with really interesting data set – and cool apps.

I’m impressed with the fact that delicious is really kind of community effort, where individual can enjoy benefit of using the application, and at the same time, the more they use it, the more useful the application has become. As if they do not have any trade off. I think delicious could be a good case study for social software, specifically – and future of application, generally.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 28th, 2004 at 11:02 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.