Interview with Joshua Schachter of del.icio.us

prostoalex writes "Joshua Schachter, a Wall Street programmer by day, and a del.icio.us hacker by night, is interviewed by Guardian. The article also provides a little background story on del.icio.us, how it got started, and how Schachter convinced Stewart Butterfield of Flickr to add tagging to the photo sharing site. Both del.icio.us and Flickr are currently members of the Yahoo! family."

open source?

[hitchhacker]

I don't think the source code to del.icio.us is open. This is why I use de.lirio.us [lirio.us] instead, which uses Rubric [cpan.org]: "a notes and bookmarks manager with tagging."

-metric

Re:yes, you missed something

[Namronorman]

Google's Personal Home Page comes to mind, I personally find it a great way to organize a home page. I have to admit though it took me awhile to get used to the personal home page versus the old fashioned simple google home page.

On my personal homepage however, I have, weather, email and bookmarks. Still simple but yet effecient!

But I think del.icio.us isn't just about storing YOUR bookmarks though, so yeah. I really don't know of any other website that does close to or exactly what del.icio.us does, if you know of any I'd like to know about them.

Re:Have you tried Opera or Konqueror?

[rm69990]

Opera's ads were removed from the free version months ago.

Re:What they're all missing

[joranbelar]

I may be missing something, but isn't what you're talking about already possible, and perhaps even better implemented, with Google and del.icio.us? Just throw multiple tags at something - if you want those 20 'funny' links to be further subdivided into 'visit daily', etc - just throw another tag at them. Then, if you want to see all your 'funny visit daily' links, just search for 'funny' AND 'visit daily'.

This has the added benefit of specialization - you don't have to create "visit daily" subfolders for every single top-level folder you have. One of the biggest problems with heirarchical classifcation systems is the "which goes first" puzzle - do you classify things under X>Y or Y>X if you have equally many values for X as you do for Y?

So, it may just be a matter of education people on the best usage of tags rather than trying to invent something new.

Re:What they're all missing

[skidoo2]

> You can tag a link as 'funny' or put it in the 'funny' folder,
> but if you have 20 'funny' links, you can't split them into
> say, 'visit daily' and 'visit weekly', or 'political' and
> 'general' or 'cartoons' and 'satire'.

Of course you can. You've obviously never used del.icio.us. It's called a "tag intersection." The syntax is simple:

http://del.icio.us/skidooooo/funny+history [del.icio.us]

For Those who don't "get" delicious

[akmolloy]

When I first came across delicious, I didn't get it either. So what if it keeps my bookmarks? But now I see it differently. It's a great resource for finding sites that other people have found useful.

As an example... the other day one of my users asked me if I knew of a good place to get fonts. She said that a lot of the sites she had gone to had all sorts of pop-ups, and some had even put adware in with the supposedly free fonts.

I had no idea where to tell her to go, so I did what I always do and searched Google. The top few results were rather questionable, and I didn't feel comfortable telling her to got to them.

So I went to delicious, and type the URL for the tag "font", and then selected the most popular sites with that tag: http://del.icio.us/popular/font [del.icio.us]. This gave me a list of sites, some which had over 3,000 other people tag them. I showed her what I was doing to find the sites, and we both felt like if that many other people found the site useful, then it was probably a safe site to check out.

On the same lines, there's a great delicious search engine here: http://collabrank.web.cse.unsw.edu.au/del.icio.us/ [unsw.edu.au] which I have been using as much as Google when I want to see sites that people trust.