Tag: del icio us

social bookmarking

Del.icio.us rolls out new (Yawn) features!

Del.icio.us, the original Social Bookmarking site is now starting to look long in the tooth and distinctly jaded beside newcomers such as Ma.gnolia.

However, all is not lost. Despite it seeming that all the innovation was sucked out of Del.icio.us when it was purchased by Yahoo! (what new functionality have they rolled out since the acquisition?), it now appears that Del.icio.us is about to launch a new look to the website and do away with the full-stops!

Seriously though, a site re-design and getting rid of the full-stops is the best they can come up with in terms of feature add? Oh dear!

Ma.gnolia, Del.icio.us has just confirmed that I made the right decision to move to you (and use your import tool to bring my Del.icio.us bookmarks with me!).

social bookmarking, social media

Social bookmarking

Do you use Del.icio.us? Do you know what it is? If you don’t know what Del.icio.us is, it is a site where, at its simplest, you can save all your bookmarks. Cool, huh? Never lose your bookmarks when you use another machine again.

It goes well beyond simple bookmarking though. For a start, you can tag your bookmarks to help you find them quickly later on. Even better though Del.icio.us also allows you to share your bookmarks (or keep them private or a combination) so people can see what interests you at any particular time. The site also publishes rss feeds for your bookmarks and tags.

Stop and think about this for a sec. People only bookmark those web pages which they think are important enough that they want to revisit them. If you have a site which has a categorised (tags), searchable list of the best web pages on the Internet, isn’t that like a Google put through a human editor process?

Once you have signed up for a (free) account with Del.icio.us, you can use a browser toolbar or a bookmarklet to drastically simplify the process of adding bookmarks to Del.icio.us. The bookmarklet option can be particularly useful if you have moved to Firefox 3.0 as the toolbar doesn’t work on FF 3.0 yet.

It is also worth noting that Del.icio.us also imports your previous bookmarks, allows you to export your bookmarks for quick backup and lets you subscribe to terms of interest so you receive up to the minute bookmarks for your subscription.

Having said all that, I have recently started to do my social bookmarking on Ma.gnolia! Why the switch away from Del.icio.us? Well, actually I am using both simultaneously with the help of Thomas Vanderwal’s Ma.Del bookmarklet. This allows me to bookmark sites in both Ma.gnolia and Del.icio.us at the same time.

Still, why Ma.gnolia? Well, Ma.gnolia has a number of things which Del.icio.us doesn’t. Ma.gnolia has a beautiful interface. It is actually pleasant to browse. Del.icio.us’ design is spartan in comparison. Ma.gnolia has a lot of support for microformats. Ma.gnolia has groups, discussions and ratings of bookmarks.

Finally Ma.gnolia has rolloed out support for APML. APML is a markup language for capturing and sharing your interests. As apml.org puts it:

APML allows users to share their own personal Attention Profile in much the same way that OPML allows the exchange of reading lists between News Readers. The idea is to compress all forms of Attention Data into a portable file format containing a description of ranked user interests

I’m not entirely sure what to do with the APML file Ma.gnolia generates but the fact that it creates it for me will, if nothing allow me to experiment.

Finally, if you are already using Del.icio.us and are considering switching, there is an import function in Ma.gnolia which allows you to bring your Del.icio.us bookmarks with you.

Browsers

Firefox 3.0b1 on OS X Leopard quick review

I downloaded and installed the beta version of Firefox 3.0 a few days ago and have been using it since on my OS X Leopard laptop.

I also installed the Proto theme for Mac Firefox which significantly enhances the look of Firefox 3 on the Mac.

firefox 3.0b1 on OS X Leopard

My initial impressions of Firefox 3.0b1 are very positive. It is fast, stable, looks really sweet and many of the memory issues which have dogged Firefox appear to have been fixed.

To expand on the memory comment, in Firefox the memory used to leak so the longer it remained open, the more memory it consumed. I have had Firefox running on this Mac now for several days with up to six windows open some of which have up to twenty five tabs running. Currently this is using 1.38gb of virtual memory. At the same time, Safari which has one window open with two tabs running is consuming 1.41gb of virtual memory!

Another change is the ability to Star and Tag bookmarks. Personally I prefer the way Flock allows you to bookmark directly into Del.icio.us.

One disadvantage of running the Firefox beta is that none of my favourite plugins now work but at least Del.icio.us have a bookmarklet which runs well out of the bookmarks toolbar so I can still bookmark there from Firefox.

The release notes list a raft of improvements under the headings:

  • More Security
  • Easier to Use
  • More Personal
  • Improved Platform for Developers and
  • Improved Performance

Overall, I like it. It seems much improved, more responsive and less of a memory hog. Shades of good things to come!

RSS

Do you use Del.icio.us fully?

At its most basic level Del.icio.us is a great idea. How many times have you lost your bookmarks when you moved to a new computer or your profile became corrupted or you switched browser?

Del.icio.us gives us a central online repository for storing our bookmarks so that we never lose them again. It also allows us to tag our bookmarks to make finding them subsequently easier.

However, Del.icio.us takes this concept a couple of steps further – in the first place, with Del.icio.us, everyone can see everyone else’s bookmarks and tags – this incredibly simple twist makes the site far more useful – it now becomes possible to see what people are bookmarking on any given topic and since you only bookmark sites which are important/useful – Del.icio.us becomes a phenomenal filter for what is good on the web.

If they had stopped there, it would have been a great site! It gets even better, though! Del.icio.us has a service, rather confusingly called Inbox, which allows you to set up a search for terms of interest and it then gives you a list of all the latest bookmarks corresponding to your search term.

My Del.icio.us Inbox

Even better than that again – you also get an rss feed for your Inbox subscriptions – so you can view these bookmarks in your rss reader – how cool is that?

I know several people who use Del.icio.us and who were completely unaware of this – are there other awesome features in Del.icio.us (or other social software apps) that are not obvious?

Browsers, Search Engines

Yahoo! purchase of Del.icio.us confirmed – who is flocking next?

Well, the post I made last night about the Yahoo! Del.icio.us rumours was confirmed this evening when Del.icio.us made the announcement of the takeover on its blog and Yahoo! posted the news also.

All day today I was doubting my source ‘cos no-one else picked up the story but, no, it came good. It is a great feeling to scoop a story like this by about 24 hours ahead of everyone else on the Internet.

Michael Arrington and others are following up on the story now.

The real question is who does Yahoo! have in its sights next? Who would it make sense for them to acquire now that they have bought Flickr and Del.icio.us? If only there were some application which tied these two together… a browser even… pity I can’t think of any 😉