though of course if you actually use del.icio.us you've probs seen this already. anyhow it is interesting. but not very practical as far as i could see
delicious, is meant to be a social bookmarks tool.
you can use it to save/tag all your bookmarks... then see the most popular bookmarks in a live feed, or look up keywords, or other people's links. my fav is simply the popular page as it throws up some interesting random links.
also good for keep a track on anything web-design related like ajax or css.
for benefit of anyone who doesn't understand my ramblings...
I have no doubt that delicious is a very useful and innovative piece of work, but I just can't get into it at all. I look at it and I just feel lost. "Where do I go?"
A redesign and some way that information is more focused would help a lot, imo.
del.icio.us is a geek-app mainly. Geeks of longstanding live on text files, and many hold the opinion that graphics do nothing for a website. del.icio.us is a very powerful tool, run and used by such people.
If you're desperate to make it all purty, write yourself a greasemonkey script, or a whole new application with their excellent API.
I gotta say, I don't mind the really plain-vanilla aspect of the thing. I just hard for me to find where to go. I don't mind it looking ugly, it just seems a bit unfunctional to me.
Maybe that's just because the web is evolving more and more into niche vortals with all the information-overload everyone is getting.
Also...how do they make money off del.icio.us? No adds, they let people use the AI fully...?
Yeah, me either really (although it could be so so much better) and I have exactly the same problem - a mash of text based links isn't too user friendly.
Once you've subscribed and start adding bookmarks, though, it gets a lot easier. You can view lots of links in areas that you're most interested in, from people you know to be good sources or just take the random information highway and waste three hours of your life in a flash!
This tool is very useful and slick, if you ever get into it...give it a go.
it comes as bookmarklet which means that you drag it into your bookmarks toolbar in firefox, and when you're on your del.icio.us page you click it, and it springs up to give you a nicer user interface. The demo is a good example http://johnvey.com/features/deliciousdirector/demo.html
As for finance, they're backed by a group of Venture capitalists (http://lists.del.icio.us/pipermail/discuss/2005-April/002801.html) who evidently see some sort of future in the social web. It's not always a matter of making money directly, but more of making money in lots of unseen ways *que x-files music*
I usually just surf the interesting links at http://del.icio.us/popular/, it usually shows up interesting stuff a small while before everyone starts talking about them.
http://del.icio.us/popular/ is wicked, i'm quite addicted to it now, and usually open up 10 or so links first thing for a super fast browse of what's hot. used to do the same on pixelsurgeon.com but that seems a bit limited now.
I wouldn't be able to function online if it weren't for del.icio.us. I move from computer to computer and having hundreds and hundreds of bookmarks saved locally would seriously slow down my portable copy of Firefox. Del.icio.us was the first web service that forced me to rethink my organization of links and content thanks to tags. Now I can't even imagine going back to the old method of organizing content.
I have to agree with jesusphreak about del.icio.us - I've tried it but just can't get into it. I love the idea of "social bookmarking" though and having my bookmarks accessible from everywhere. I've found that http://www.spurl.net/ is much nicer interface-wise and feature-wise - at least to my sensibilities. Guess I'm not geek enough for del.icio.us. And, if you are already a del.icio.us user, Spurl "talks" to del.icio.us so you get the best of both worlds.
I used to keep my bookmarks updated on both Spurl and del.icio.us. That was until I started backing up my del.icio.us account to Gmail. Services like Spurl are nice because the current page is archived correct? Or was that some other bookmarking service?
There are definitely a lot of options out there for social bookmarking services.