del.icio.us, y.ah.oo and why I love it

I recently wrote about my recent discovery of a two year old site, del.icio.us which provides a mix of distributed bookmarking and social networking. At first I was quite fascinated with finding what others considered important enough to bookmark but I have since found so many uses for it, both practical and philosophical. Here are a few things about me that I know are common for most of us. We don't spend our entire day in front of a single computer. We don't always belong to a Windows domain with document redirection. We all think that bookmarking as-is in both IE and Firefox is a terrible exercise in how to poorly organize information. We all read web content in the AP newswire style – you've got the first paragraph to tell me why I should read the rest – if you lose me there I scroll down the page and scan for what I came for and if I have to roll my mice twice its quicker to just click back and try another site. No, I am not lazy, I just have things to do and your poorly written site is wasting my time. Enter del.icio.us – why do we bookmark at all? Because what we are looking at is a good source of information we either will need to refer to in the future or do not have the time to fully consider at the moment. So you hit CTRL+D and one of two things happen: If you're a good organizer you spend more than a few seconds trying to find the category to put it in…. or you're like 99.99999% of people – hit enter and let it fall where it may. While this is great for efficiency purposes, it makes it nearly impossible to locate later. Furthermore, which computer did you bookmark it on? Home? Work? Pocket PC? Email? Oh, now I remember I searched Google for… the monuments of inefficiency. So here is my story. I'm setting up a new laptop (media center) and I needed to get some stuff. Now, I could have gone to my desktop to dig up the Firefox bookmarks.html file, but instead I just logged in to my account at del.icio.us and had all my bookmarks there live. While I was installing VNC I found another similar project – bookmarked it! The question came up – url, descriptions, notes, tags. Url and description are prefilled by the url and title, but in a few seconds I just typed vnc so when I need to track this down I can just login to my del.icio.us account and search for vnc. No folders to create, nothing to scroll through to see if I already had the vnc folder.. Just set it and forget it. And when my buddies ask me for links to VNC stuff I can just point them to my del.icio.us account and let them search there for vnc. There you go for social and distributed! And its no surprise that Yahoo purchased del.icio.us to be added to the other social projects in Flickr and Upcoming.org – this gives Yahoo a big edge on Google and even bigger one on Microsoft as the Internet becomes a more social, connected place. For the longest time companies like Yahoo and Excite (are they even around anymore) have tried to force people into communities with fairly little success. But by giving the world the ability to search, connect and categorize information on their own terms – without joining, signing up or belonging.. the information is becoming a lot more connected and distributed. P.S. As a side note to Bob and Stefan at Microsoft's social networking crew – take a note from these widely popular social sites Yahoo has acquired… notice a little pattern on ease of use and accessibility?… no downloads, no plugins, no sidebars, nothing to install to search and use. Its one thing if you're counting on the Microsoft desktop monopoly to distribute the OPML-o-meter but I doubt you'll get a wide adoption the good idea you have if you don't make it burdenless and accessible. Don't make this another "good idea, poor implementation" dodo bird that goes the way of Microsoft Bob.