dria - Latest Comments in I just don’t get it.

Re: I just don’t get it.

Ellen — Thu, 26 May 2005 09:05:47 -0000

you can use it to publish an RSS feed of any one category of links or all of your favorite or related links on your site. I've also seen someone that used it to index their own site, and used that RSS feed to generate a site index.

Re: I just don’t get it.

Zed — Thu, 19 May 2005 18:38:08 -0000

I didn't get del.icio.us at first. Now I use it every day. For me, the big advantages are:

1) A convenient means to share bookmarks between home and work
2) A convenient way to find my bookmarked pages (I'm finding tags work better for me than hierarchical categories.)

I haven't publicized my del.icio.us bookmarks, so that's not really a feature for me. I occasionally browse at random to see what the new it webpage is (like I used to use Technorati for, or Blogdex and Daypop before that) and, more rarely, explore at random. Those aren't very important features to me compared to the first two, which are enough.

Re: I just don’t get it.

Ray — Wed, 18 May 2005 02:43:19 -0000

I use del.icio.us for my bookmarks also. The advantage is that I have access to my bookmarks from any computer any where. I don't have a Mac so I can't use .mac.

My main reason for posting is to note that your bookmarks don't have to be public in any important way. Just make your username be some random string that you can remember, but can't be traced back to you.

Re: I just don’t get it.

dria — Mon, 16 May 2005 13:31:17 -0000

This textarea is way too small. I'll fix it eventually.

Personally, I'm not really keen on my bookmarks being public, and I'm still on the fence as to whether I hate this new concept of "tagging" or not (semantic tagging is awesome, don't get me wrong, but the random "I'll just make up random tags as I go" thing irks me). Anyhow, I don't have a del.icio.us account. Don't know if I'll bother with one or not.

Re: I just don’t get it.

boolean — Mon, 16 May 2005 13:17:19 -0000

Yes dria, you're missing something. Mary and swap present good examples of what's useful about it. (I'm not a user). For me, it's interesting as an aggregator of what people are linking to, showing "what's hot at the moment".

Lately, for universal bookmark storage, I'm more into using Safari bookmark synching with my .mac account. It's quite nice, not to mention my bookmarks travel with me from desktop to laptop.

also, this textarea is far too small. :)

~ b

Re: I just don’t get it.

Mary — Mon, 16 May 2005 02:17:35 -0000

swap,

I just don't match that particular use case. When I'm visiting a site, I'm either visiting from its RSS feed (via my aggregator), visiting it because I'm a regular and know the URL, or from a Google search. I'm very rarely looking for something at the level of generality of "links about gentoo" or something like that. I'm more likely to be looking for "getting gentoo to boot on the something something motherboard", and Google is better than tagging at that sort of thing.

Re: I just don’t get it.

swap — Sun, 15 May 2005 06:32:44 -0000

Mary: Regarding the social aspect, you may not find someone whose feed matches yours but you can certainly use rss feeds of a particular topic, say gentoo or startup.

Re: I just don’t get it.

Mary — Sun, 15 May 2005 00:25:00 -0000

Here's what I like about it as a user:
- a fairly flat site for bookmark storage where things are tagged rather than buried in folders. I can find my bookmarks more easily on del.icio.us than I can in a web browser's bookmarks menu
- bookmarks accessible via my del.icio.us user page from any web browser (the "Hotmail advantage")
- the handy provision of the pop-up del.icio.us bookmarklet so that I can click "pop up post to del.icio.us" in my taskbar at any time and post a link to the page I'm looking at for later reference.

In summary: good bookmarking. The kind of thing where I thought "wow, no wonder I never used bookmarks before this." I don't care about the 'social' aspect at all: I either bookmark really popular URLs with 500 other people linking to them, or really unusual ones with no other links, so it's not as if I'm finding new friends through del.icio.us.