In If You Don’t Use Del.icio.us, You Will Now at TechCrunch, the venerable web 2.0 buzz site, shows a cluelessness that’s quite remarkable. I’ve already missed the WWW ticket give-away and don’t care since I’m speaking, but really Mike, could you be more web 1.0?
Cramming delicious bookmarks into a hierarchy kills all that’s good about the service. Admittedly, speed is sometimes an issue, but the power of del.icio.us is the (personal and global) folksonomy, rejection of explicit hierarchy, and popularity mechanisms, along with the networking aspects of shared links.
The data is in, and has been for years, browser based, hierarchical bookmarks don’t work. There’s a lot of innovation in this space, but the Flock originated embedding of delicious cloud bookmarks in the browser is not innovative, it’s commercialization.
http://surfmind.com/musings/gems/linkdelizoomer_v01.gif
I mentioned some hacking I’m doing on the all.xml output from del.icio.us’ API in Firefox chrome. I’ve saved a static version an early rendering that supports browsing my many of my 1200 links at del.icio.us/andyed.
The image at the right shows the system state where analytics is being hovered. The coloring of the other keywords shows the co-occurence of the tag analytics with google, ajax, screencasts, blogging, and usability. The “weighted list” of the tag cloud shows the quantity of links with the tag, while the coloring of related tags shows the percent of urls with the second tag that co-occur.
This is a dual coding of the tag weight, but produces a nice aesthetic. In addition, the order of the tags is random currently. I’m working on packing more information into the view… there’s lots of it in the tag data, unlike a traditional hierarchy.
Anyway, have fun with the demo (Firefox only probably), click a tag to view the URLs, and send any good ideas my way for a true alternative to del.icio.us in the browser.
This analyzes the relationships between Andy's meta tags on del.icio.us.
