Del.icio.us, the bookmark-sharing community has gained its one millionth member. If you’ve not tried it yet, now’s the time…According to Heather Green on BusinessWeek Blogspotting, del.icio.us now has a million members, up from 300,000
If you’ve not tried del.icio.us its well worth a look. At its simplest it acts as a replacement for your web browser’s favourites folder. You save web pages you find interesting to it, adding a few keyword “tags” and a description to it. If that’s all it did I’d be a fan - losing favourites as computers crashed or just when I changed machines had always been an irritation to me.
But as del.icio.us is a social media service, the fun comes from the community. If you’ve tagged something as “thinktank” for instance, you might wonder who else in the community has used that tag on a site they have bookmarked. Each link in the site has a number of people who have linked to it next to it so you can see its relative popularity.
Then there are a thousand other things you can do with it - from creating networks of like-minded del.icio.us users so you can see what they have found interesting recently to setting up feeds to your home page or blog.
: : In her post, Heather Green relates some of a conversation with founder, Joshua Schacter:
Joshua made an interesting distinction. Instead of finding information a la Google, social search is about finding knowledge. The idea is how do you connect with the information you need in a context that’s knitted together by people and by human expertise, rather than the linear way we do it now, which is to type a search term into a box.
He talked about one way in which he wanted to work more on this by figuring out ways to better highlight expertise on the service. (By pinpointing, for instance, people who were faster at finding new information or trends online.)
That’s a really interesting approach. For me del.icio.us is not just a useful utility but a powerful way of finding expert knowledge - far more interesting (and bear in mind I’m a social media not a search specialist) than other things that Yahoo is doing, such as Yahoo! Answers.
