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 .