Social Bookmarks

Over the next few weeks I’m going to introduce a few of the software products and services that I cannot live without, are what I beleive to be genius in their design, and provide huge value - beit for communication, project management or other.

A few years ago, while at Semaview, I sat down to design a software service for sharing bookmarks over the Web. I was tired of emailing my bookmarks from one machine to another, and needed a way to easily share net finds with friends and colleagues. At the time, our advisor Jim Hendler put me in touch with one of his students - Bijan Parsia in order to get feedback on a semantic RDF vocabulary I had specified for exchanging bookmarks. It was largely based on XBEL and a few other existing projects. One of the first things Bijan asked me was, “Why not just use RSS?”. The suggestion to use RSS for yet another type of syndication launched me into an office rant. Were we going to shoehorn everything into RSS? “If you syndicate news, bookmarks, products, personal identity etc. with the same vocabulary you’ll end up with no meaning at all!”, I exclaimed to some of the developers working with me at the time. About six months later, we had moved on to eventSherpa and someone else had started to provide a service almost identical to the one we had been designing. And what did they use to syndicate the bookmarks? RSS of course. Not a proprietary schema like the one we had advocated for, but rather the existing vocabulary already with a large number of supporting tools and users. They made the right decision, and the service has exploded. del.icio.us is a free service for storing, sharing and classifying your bookmarks. It can and is called many things, but I use it primarily as a social bookmarking tool. I can have my bookmarks wherever I may be, can integrate them into Web-sites easily (see the ‘Out on the Web’ list in the right column), can subscribe to my friends links, and can browse what’s hot with the del.icio.us userbase. Del.icio.us was also one of the first popular services that enabled users to ‘tag’ their data, creating what some are calling folksonomies. I’ll be posting more on folksonomies in a few days.

Congratulations to the del.icio.us developers. It is a prime example of a simple, yet powerful, software service. I use it each and every day, for both personal and business exchanges.I’ll post again shortly to expand on how to use del.icio.us in your projects - to easily colloborate on, and syndicate content over, the Web.