I don’t think mainstream users will embrace social bookmarks until either a. yahoo integrates the results from del.icio.us into their search results or b. IE comes with a bookmarking tool and community.

I am an internet power-user (it’s my job) but even I probably have less then 100 bookmarks in delicious. I do use the site regularly to find stuff though, it’s great as a search engine for web-specific topics. I suspect the vast majority of web users, the ones that advertisers need to reach, do not need a full featuered bookmark system. But they do need to find the best websites. Google is still the best, but it can be very frustrating for many topics. Leveraging the capabilities of delicious for search results is the best bet for mainstream adoption. Of course, at that point it may run into many of the same problems as a traditional search engine.

One other note– I manage a number of large, general-interest sites, and delicious sends very little traffic our way. Oddly enough, Stumbleupon shows up in the top 100 referrers all the time. Perhaps the more social aspect of stumbleupon encourages people to visit new sites? The point I’d like to make about this is that delicious’ community is larger and perhaps more exciting, but they aren’t leveraging that, instead they are focusing on features that mainstream people don’t care about.

I have only one thing to say: http://www.revver.com/video/41097

That’s actually how it goes. Del.icio.us will loose its leading place, and will be replaced by another future competitor. First thing that comes up (as an example) is Friendster which gave its place to Myspace.

I have no idea how alexa and comscore work, but:

1) do they take into account the people who use del.icio.us through 3rd party tools rather than through a web browser? I would imagine that most power users would be using accessing del.icio.us through such tools.
Here’s a good list of the 3rd party tools available:
http://www.quickonlinetips.com.....ollection/

2) do they take into account RSS feed traffic?
According to Joshua, “del.icio.us does way more RSS traffic than HTML or API stuff”. (from http://simon.incutio.com/notes.....achter.txt )

I use Del.icio.us all the time - indirectly. I use its plugin via firefox. Thatway I can bookmark the pages and not go directly to Del.icio.us’s web page. I therefore rarely visit the webpage… I wonder if this has something to do with the figures. Ie - there are great deal of users but they dont need to visit Del.icio.us webpage to use the service.

I’m with sd.

I’ve dropped del.icio.us to use ma.gnolia.com instead. I like the fact that del.icio.us has a firefox plugin, but that wasn’t enough to keep me around as a user. The site is - in a word - ugly… It hasn’t added features in God knows how long.

I’m with sd. I use del.icio.us in many ways that have nothing to do with visiting pages. (However, they also have nothing to do with a business model either.) For example, I use del.icio.us to power a link blog — sorta as a one-click content management system (i.e. del.icio.us/rexblog ’s rss feed is displayed on my blog rexblog.com as a ‘link blog’) or del.icio.us/smallbusiness ’s rss feed is used to provide the headlines and links on the front page of Smallbusiness.com. I view del.icio.us as more of a work-horse than the social bookmarking tools I use ( http://www.kaboodle.com/rex ). I suggest a way to measure the “metrics” of a bookmarking service is not “page views” but total pages bookmarked. I wonder how the other bookmarking services match up to del.icio.us in that category?

What it really needs is to release a good way of syncing your bookmarks between your browser and the site.

I’ve been trying to win over co-workers on using del.icio.us but it is a big leap for some people to move from alphabetical sorting/folders to tags. Hopefully with the spreading popularity of sites like del.icio.us and flickr it will become more mainstream.

Also, they could attract “less tag savvy” people by allowing things like alphabetical sorting and a more inviting user interface to reel people in.

I also agree with sd, adam - rarely go to the site with firefox extension and netvibes module - not sure if these will count on some of the metrics.

I use del.icio.us like sd as well. BTW, Michael, I hope this isn’t a trend, reporting partial numbers like this. You reported that Google Talk numbers were bad, but admittedly didn’t include people using Talk inside GMail, which is a HUGE part of the equation. And now, you’re reporting that the delicious.com domain is losing traffic. I never even knew that there was a delicious.com domain, and I use del.icio.us every day. You’[ve said before that you were just reporting what the stats company put out. I say go with another stats company - the one you use sucks.

Even though tagging is “the way of the future”, i have yet to really adopt it and I consider myself a power user. I don’t know how that is going to go mainstream.

Flock does browser bookmark syncing, which is maybe why numbers may be lower as i rarely go to del.icio.us anymore.

I agree with the comments above. The page views matrix doesn’t make a lot of sense. I use del.icio.us contstantly through Flock.

I think that del.icio.us needs a re-design and new functionality, just like we have seen recently with digg.com. Without this update i think del.icio.us will be muscled out by new social bookmarking websites, especially with social bookmarking going mainstream.

I wonder how much of the growth was website developers bookmarking there own things hoping to get some more pageviews and them backing off because the pageviews they got weren’t worth the effort.

I still prefer using bloglines to track blogs and Firefox to track individual pages. I’ve been using a Firefox plugin to sync my bookmarks. Seems easier to use for me.

I’m still using del.icio.us, but I, as other commenters, was struck by the fact that you didn’t mention ma.gnolia to put things in context regarding del.icio.us. I know of other people who have switched to ma.gnolia for a number of reasons.

I guess there’s a lot more competition and those new sites offer more and better features. Since the new sites will (nearly) all import your delicious marks, then there’s little barrier to moving.

More social: stumbleupon
Prettier: blinklist, magnolia
More functional: diigo, rawsugar
More specialised: connotea
Bigger brands: Yahoo MyWeb 2.0, MSN Live bookmarks

I agree that boosting delicious’ social side will be a very good move since it will allow them to capitalise on what they do appear to have - the most users.

I didn’t even know they had a .com address! I’m with sd and a few other though, I bookmark through Firefox directly.

I bookmark with spurl from firefox and have spurl set up to also send my bookmarks to delicious.

A double dose of bookmarkin’ fun - all without visiting either site.

I’m not sure if your stats are relevant Mike.

The alexa #s are off because the doubling or tripling of numbers that are shown for all tech sites were when diggers and other tech sites were let onto the alexa plugin for Firefox.

I switched to blinklist.

I switched from Del.icio.us to Shadows a couple of months ago. While both have similar features, I found Shadows to be more aesthetically pleasing and I like to see screenshots of each bookmarklet. The other real driving factor was my switch to the Flock browser. Flock offers complete, native integration with both Del.icio.us and Shadows. If only Del.icio.us had been available, I would probably have stuck with it for ease of use. Del.icio.us needs to come up with a killer feature and update their image-less technicolor look and feel. I’m sure Yahoo! will cook up something to get it back on track.

I’ve been watching the feature stagnation in amazement. Big company, no agility?
But I agree with others, looking at numbers for the .com version of the site is useless. Whatever company provided the numbers must not be well informed.

For what it’s worth, when I built Simpy, I purposely didn’t want it to be a destination site. I wanted it to be a useful tool for individuals, and not yet another site they feel they need to visit, another site that contributes to their information overload. The usage style I envisioned was “find, and get the f out”. In the end, people, mostly non-registered visitors, still browse the site a lot.

Chris: BetterSearch extension will put thumbnails of screenshots next to links on del.icio.us, Simpy, and a few others. Look for the URL under simpy.com/tools .

I read everything through bloglines.com, (including TechCrunch) and actually subscribe to a feed from diggdot.us which tries to deduplicate slashdot, digg and del.icio.us stories. So their content is being read, but thanks to the magic of RSS they have no way to track this and market back to me with adverts etc. unless I see something interesting enough that I want to comment on it and click through to their site. In almost every case, the things I click on are from Digg, a few are from Slashdot, I don’t remember ending up at del.icio.us.

So like many sites, they are getting readers but no traffic. I’m not consuming any resources that would cost them anything, so its a free way to get mindshare, but someone needs to start analyzing the aggregators to see the real readership.

Like many others, I rarely go directly to the site but tag through Flock to generate a sidebar on my site and a daily RSS feed of my tagged articles. Other social services do have interesting angles but I see the built in (or plug in) approach of Flock or Firefox being the smart and easy way to contribute to any of these sites. Perhaps the numbers are misleading due to more users accessing the services this way.

Showing stats for delicious.com, which most del.icio.us users probably didn’t know even pointed at the main site, seems like a gross misrepresentation of their actual traffic.

Might it be possible that the traffic represents would-be visitors of the old delicious.com (I think it used to be a gift basket site), which is now declining as users are redirected to the (more famous to the techcrunch crowd) social bookmarking service.

I am a long-time del.icio.us user and I have never gone to the .com domain. I didn’t even know they had it until I read this post. I’ll bet that I’m not the only one.

You used to be able to join tags with + signs to get links that matched both tags. that was the most useful thing EVER. once yahoo bought them, they took away that ability and I haven’t used it much since.

Dear Yahoo/Del.icio.us PR (who I am guessing is reading along),

Adding more features and redesigning the site is not necessarily a solution to anything. You may be doing just fine and these statistics may be very off. If you hope to bring your service to the mainstream, the people that read this site are no longer your target market. They are the innovators and the early adopters. While this group is extremely smart and well versed in the space, there is a huge gap between them and the early majority, which is who you should be courting.

When I show people who are potentially in that early majority your service they are amazed. The problem is they have no idea that you exist or what you do. Figure out how to communicate this and you will be golden. Adding more features will not help you accomplish this.

Certainly keep the TechCrunchers happy, but if you left it up to them, they would add features and functionality until your service was complicated and difficult to explain. This group will move onto the latest and greatest no matter what, that’s what makes them early adopters. The early majority likes simple, simple, simple. That’s what your service is, keep it that way.

The stats are for delicious.com - but if you see delicious.com it has a 301 permanently moved to del.icio.us website - therefore the domains will reflect each other as a mirror. If it was just a soft redirect of any other kind - then hits would be counted (I guess this may depend on the analytics). I know that where I work I have 3 different domain names all pointing back to the same domain. My stats (According to google analytics) will always reflect based on the root domain. The other domains all have 301 redirects to the root domain. They are aliases. So, this representation could very well be true.

And for those who use delicious through a browser plugin, it STILL counts as traffic to their website because you are connecting to their server to get your bookmarks or other information. Just because you aren’t visiting the page directly doesn’t mean they don’t get the hits and pageviews tracked. Thats like saying that since I subscribe to Techcrunch.com via RSS - that they don’t get the traffic. It still has to contact their server to retrieve the information.

So - I don’t think these stats are too far off - but I would definitely cross-compare these with other traffic statistics.

who the hell uses delicious.com?

my hope is that they’ll come forward and post real metrics since it seems like the majority of people use alternate means to access the site.

I’d prefer a comfortable niche to a social bookmarking monopoly (For me reddit
> digg interms of the stories I like to read).

I’d rather del.icio.us not being able to track absolute popularity and have a huge user community if it means it maintains the quality I like (interms of popular URLs that show up and the sevice quality).

I personally prefer del.icio.us’s minimalistic design.

Is it just me, or doesn’t all internet traffic reduce significantly in the summer months, notably (June, July August) because people are not spending as much time on the internet and more time outdoors ?

Well that seems to be the trend for most big sites anyway. I think a good comparison would be year-over-year, rather than month-over-month.

looking at some of the comments here and tracking the number of other more newbie friendly bookmarking services emerging, I’d say that while del.icio.us appealed well to the geeky/digerati fringe, it’s not likely to gain as much attention fm the 20-somethings MySpace users that are beginning to make up the greater Web market. They like bling and del.icio.us prides itself on not having any, but it will be curious to see how it evolved under the Yahoo! umbrella since they obviously understand more mainstream markets.

The Alexa stats for the site _people actually use_ shows a different picture:

http://tinyurl.com/krhuv

In terms of design and functionality, there’s a reason why Craigslist hasn’t redesigned in years. Minimalism can be a good thing. While it’s always nice to see folks push the envelope, if it ain’t broke…

Personally I think the tag assignment screen on del.icio.us to be one of the most useable things on the ‘net.

del.icio.us has proved to be one of the most valuable services that I have used, but I agree that there has been very little action for a while. Some small incremental updates, even rather useful ones, but nothing that jumps out. Definitely some of the aesthetics could use an upgrade. That said, its still a breeze to use and tagging is a piece of cake (esp with the Firefox toolbar).

Just to hedge my bets, I am trying out Diigo, which happens to have excellent del.icio.us integration.

I thought I was noticing a slow-down in the turnover on the delicious/popular page. I actually scan through their (and Digg’s and others) RSS feeds without going directly to the site, and then tagging sites through a firefox plugin.

I’m a designer, and I like nice design, but I don’t think the delicios design needs tinkering at this point. It just needs some more features to draw users back in. Personally I’d like to see discussions on bookmarks. And it would be nice if they could do something about redundant bookmarks (site.com, site.com/index.html etc)

With over 400 bookmarks now, it’s hard for me to consider using other systems (even if they might have better/more features)

del.icio.us/analogpanda

Are these numbers believable? 75% drop in total page views month over month? ComScore #’s are flawed.

I for one used del.icio.us for quite some time, then switched to ma.gnolia. After a while ma.gnolia really began to frustrate me. The interface is definitely nice, but the speed of the site and the advertising started to make bookmarking tasks, especially lookups, dreadfully slow. del.icio.us is extremely fast in this area, and has much better browser support through plugins and Flock integration. To me, doing day to day work with del.icio.us is a much more efficient experience.

I think some of what is being posed misses the point. Many use del.icio.us for simple storage and organization of their bookmarks, nothing more. When it comes to stats, people who are happy using the service in that way could care less about what the new “hot” social bookmarking site is. They don’t like moving their bookmarks continually from one property to another. Even with the import/export features, many of the social bookmarking sites support different tagging styles that make cleaning up tags after import a nightmare. Try going from ma.gnolia’s tag style (comma separators anyone?) back to del.icio.us, it’s not fun.

as noted on digg… take a look at that graphic closely…
its traffic for delicious.com not del.icio.us (although the former redirects)

This whole article is grossly inaccurate if the traffic statistics are as they appear to be… partial.

ComScore numbers presented in this article is US only. When you pulled out worldwide numbers, you will get a different picture:
Unique = 680,000 uniques
Page Views = 6MM page views

I remember the URLs of sites I want to visit and type them directly.

I don’t care what URLs you’re interested in.

Does this make me weird?

Deli.cio.us is an irritating name for a product that has little to no appeal to the mainstream. It’s a geek product.

I’m still using del.icio.us, but I considering switching to ma.gnolia pretty soon. The del.icio.us design is getting really old..

I use delicious every day more and more, but all through the foxylicious extension so I imagine my stats and everyone else who does the same won’t show up there?

yes it sounds like a cooking site but its not so much the name but rather that mainstream users barely use bookmarks in their browser yet alone for sharing via some service as this…

delicious has always been a slow mover. Had it not been started in the dotcom winter, I do not think they stand a chance against fast innovators like Diigo and Magolia. If you like pretty UI, Magolia is better. If you like great features, Diigo is head and shoulder above all the others

I’ve been using del.icio.us about 2 years, have over 3000 links, and see no reason to switch.

I mainly use del.icio.us for its large technical community. I kind of hope it *doesn’t* get too popular, or that J and Yahoo keep the tags relevant somehow if it does.

I really couldn’t care less about features. I mainly browse it through tag RSS feeds and submit with a bookmarklet or Firefox plugin. Its minimalistic design is a big part of its appeal for me. I hope they *don’t* add most of the crap I’ve seen suggested.

I’ve wondered why Yahoo! bought del.icio.us in the first place. Del.icio.us didn’t have a business model, and as far as I can tell, still doesn’t. Did Yahoo! just buy the user base? But how does that help them without a way to monetize? A friend of mine suggested that Yahoo! may have bought del.icio.us for the data set, which is intriguing. I could see plenty of uses for a tagged, annotated database of URLs. Perhaps this data will inform future Yahoo search results.

Like sd & others, I too use del.icio.us every day, although I don’t visit the website directly. I use the firefox plugin, flock interface, & syndicate my del.icio.us feeds via RSS to my personal site.

When I do visit the site, however, I prefer the extremely lightweight design. Too many websites employ complicated designs with fancy gradients, rounded edges, etc… Del.icio.us lets the content speak for itself, and doesn’t worry about being flashy. Instead, it tries to be “useful.”

In terms of it going “mainstream”: As a dedicated long-time del.icio.us user, I’d personally hope it doesn’t get much bigger.

Here’s why: the “community” at del.icio.us is very much the early adopter, tech-saavy types (erm.. like myself). As a result, the “popular page” regularly lists certain types of things — how to set up webservers, CSS tricks, GTD utilities, etc… these are things I like and am interested in.

Should del.icio.us (and social bookmarking) go mainstream, I suspect the makeup of the community would change significantly. The “Popular” page would start listing online equivalents of chain email memes, “funny” baseball-in-the-nuts-videos, celeb gossip, and a bunch of other crap I could care less about. (Think social bookmarking equivalent of MySpace)

Add to that an even lower signal-to-noise ratio, with spammers etc using del.icio.us to make a quick buck, and you’ll kill off the community that made del.icio.us useful in the first place.

Delicious needs a better search engine. There current search is extremely slow, especially with the search plugin on Firefox.

IMHO the power of del.ici.us is user generated search.

I was surprised they sold to yahoo, as I was expecting them to take on google with a totally differnet mechanism for search. I find much better websites and resources compared to google.

I have not used Delicious before. How much do you think that it is a good search engine, compared to the rest under compatible platform? Somehow, Yahoo seems to be not able to push forward their technological advances, despite their wide resources under their hand.

I had heard a lot of talk about Delicious and started to use it and got sick of it.the main problem was searchign my book marks…i tage it,save it,forget about it…but alas! cant find it….and i also hate the way the bookmarks are listed last first only 10 per page….google bookmarks does a great job at that and i use them all the time.

Does the phrase “social bookmarking” strike anyone other than me as utterly ridiculous?

Interestingly enough, I’m not surprised by the decline in traffic and interest in delicious since it’s acquisition. It seemed to me at the announcement that even a company with as lax a collar as Yahoo would still cause a disruption in the methodology and seeming imperviousness of delicious.

@Andrew

I could see Yahoo enhancing their search results to include tagged results from del.icio.us. For example, I go to Yahoo search, type in SaaS, and in the sidebar you’d see something like “Popular on del.icio.us”, followed by the most popular links that were tagged with “saas”. In some ways it’s smart for Yahoo to keep the bookmarkers on del.icio.us limited to a small percentage of “geek” users. This keeps the quality of the links high so that they can use it to enhance their search.

I don’t think del.icio.us is being targeted at mainstream anytime soon.

They have “My Web” for that and last I remember reading a month or 2 ago, “My Web” had already matched the delicious traffic (likely due to the link next to the search box). However, the audience for it is much more into using it for personal reasons rather than social bookmarking and the public links on the service reflect that.

It’s the same strategy they use for keeping flickr and Yahoo! Photos separate (Yahoo Photos being the mainstream product). And strangely enough, similar to that comparison, My Web has some features that delicious does not, like being able the cache your links and do a full text search on them.

I use del.icio.us. I love it. I think people who find it useful will continue to use and love it.

Articles like this will just cause all the “me-too” web 2.0 followers to think about jumping ship, since maybe it’s not “hip” anymore to del.icio.us. It’s OK though. I think if you normalized those numbers around the number of flighty “me-too” users who never actually wanted to use the service, you’d see a steadily climbing line. Not as steep, but climbing. Real users are what matters.

If you intend to jump from one social bookmarking site to another frequently, I just launched a web site that may help out a bit:

http://bookmarkit.org

It doesn’t matter what social bookmarking site you use (del.icio.us, mag.nolia, furl, fark,etc), one link will bookmark your current favorite site:

http://bookmarkit.org/mark.htm.....delicious/

I’m currently working on a Firefox plugin… perhaps something to aid in transferring bookmarks from one site to another. Its pretty new, I haven’t decided yet on what to focus on.

I use del.icio.us almost everyday and add to my bookmarks whenever I see anything interesting, but it doesn’t mean I ever go to the site. With their roll out of toolbars for Firefox and IE and heavy support of RSS who needs to go to the site anymore? Can users like me account for some of the decreased traffic?

I do think del.icio.us needs to do something to attract new users; there is only so many friends in my network to send over there.

http://www.alexa.com/data/deta.....cio.us#top

So unless I’m mischaracterizing this chart (which is always possible!), another perspective is that Del.icio.us has tripled its reach in the last few months…which if true, seems pretty impressive to me…

Interesting comments so far. It looks like a lot of people use the site from other apps and using mechanisms that keep their eyeballs away from the actual pages on delicious. It’s interesting to think what that does to advertising possibilities there…

As people mentioned, nobody uses delicious.com. Just compare the two on Alexa:

http://www.alexaholic.com/del......6m&z=6

The huge drop is because 3 of the 4 people using delicious.com switched to del.icio.us.

Comscore and Alexa can only do so much - so I wouldn’t put complete faith in them, the truth is in the server logs on the actual server. So, as others have said above - if they are accessing via RSS or a toolbar, alexa and comscore don’t see this as traffifc (unless somehow they have super secret access to the raw server logs of every site). THIS is the innacurate part.

The domains can easily be aliased together, and then (as they are when you check), redirected with a 301 Moved Permanently redirect. So - the two domains are not separate anymore - but function as one entity - sharing stats and everything else. This part is not innacurate.

What WOULD be accurate is statistics from the actual domain. Something that is tracked. An analytics screenshot. Raw server stats. Anything but Alexa and Comscore.

Alexa shows a massive traffic jump for del.icio.us (*not* delicious.com) since April of 2006 and ranks it as the #146 most popular site on the web. You draw your own conclusions:

http://www.alexa.com/data/deta.....el.icio.us

Interesting from the LookSmart earnings conference call last week. The CEO Hills indicated their Furl property is gaining traffic/use at 1% per week.
He did not elaborate how much of it was from their deal with the NYTimes.
Furl remains my “social bookmarking” site of choice.

i used to like Delicious a lot in the Early Halcyon daze of finding out about cool Web2.0 stuff*

there was always one or 2 good nuggets of useful info* Now i find going direct to the Source TechCrunch is the way to travel!!

i also find the stuff on the main page to be boring geeky programmer type stuff* Not the FUN stuff*

;))

Why would anyone bother to use del.icio.us, or Furl, or any other of those sites, when you can use Diigo and get all the functionality of any other site, plus a whole lot more. Diigo http://www.diigo.com is a social bookmarking service that also lets you highlight, clip, and comment upon Web content, right on-screen. In other words, Diigo is the first true Web research tool.

From the comments here, looks like the old first-mover disadvantage from the Web 1.0 is at work here again!

The problem seems to be that the most vocal users don’t want a simple tool, but a constantly evolving toy. I guess you can call me a hardcore user - with 837 bookmarks and a network I read over RSS - and in terms of functionality, there is really nothing I would like added to del.icio.us. I wouldn’t mind seeing some new ideas / technology well implemented, but at the moment there is just nothing lacking.

Synchronization with the browser is irrelevant - who the hell wants to do that? And why? Bookmarks in your browser are an anachronism, nowadays you should just use ScrapBook for Firefox, instantly saving the contents with the webpage link and having it all searchable. Because otherwise, you have to remember WHERE you’ve seen the content that you most often just vaguely remember seeing somewhere.

Also, I have to laugh at the “design is in the rut” crowd. Firstly, if you are seeing the webpage design all the time, you are not doing things right. Secondly, more color does not equal a better interface.

After using furl for quite some time, Flock also drove me to try Shadows - if anything - to go with the underdog and see what they’ve brewed up.

Chris shares:
> Flock offers complete, native integration with both Del.icio.us and Shadows. If only Del.icio.us had been available, I would probably have stuck with it for ease of use.

What do you mean by “had been available?” did the integration fail or not work or something?

If anyone has a pointer to a comparitive analysis of these 3 social bookmarking sites (and any others that have cropped up), please let us know!

brand meridia .