Del.icio.us: Social bookmarking phenomenon

By 2001, Joshua Schachter decided he needed to develop a software program to help him organize and manage all the links to Web pages he had collected in previous years.

Bookmarking them on his browser had never really been a useful method for Schachter to keep track of his links.

"You can't have more than 40 or 50 bookmarks. Otherwise, it becomes a huge pain to organize. And I had over 20,000 links," says Schachter, with the quick, to-the-point and intense delivery that characterizes many New Yorkers like himself.

You see, by then, Schachter had for three years been running a Web site called Memepool, a sort of collective blog for people to list links to Web pages they like, along with a short commentary on them.

Suggestions for Web site links poured in to Schachter, who ran Memepool in his spare time with a partner. Schachter would paste the links into a text file.

When he topped 20,000 links in 2001, Schachter developed a single-user application to automate the collection and management of his bookmarks collection. The program worked so well for him, that in 2003, he rewrote it from scratch as a multiuser system and launched it on the Web for others to use. He called it del.icio.us.

"I got a little help, but mostly I wrote everything myself," says Schachter, who is 31 years old.

He hoped others would find the system as useful as he did. He was right about that. With no formal marketing, today del.icio.us has about 200,000 registered users.

"The growth has been huge, incredible," he says. Along the way, del.icio.us has become the epitome of a phenomenon called social bookmarking.

"A lot of people are saying we're entering a new Web: Web 2.0. They believe a key component of the Web's next generation will be this element of social bookmarking, which is what you'd call a personalized Web," says Allen Weiner, a Gartner Inc. analyst.

Basically, del.icio.us users each have a page on the Web site (http://del.icio.us/) where they keep bookmarks of sites they like. So right off the bat, the service is convenient because users can access their bookmarks from any computer connected to the Internet.

Users are asked to add descriptive tags to each bookmark. For example, a user might label a page about Spain's soccer league with the tags "Spain" and "soccer." By tagging pages, users can classify them and organize them into groups, making it easier to navigate the list of links. Del.icio.us also lets users search their list by keywords, and organize the list chronologically by the date when links were added.

But del.icio.us' real appeal lies beyond being a personal, hosted bookmark manager. This is where the social aspect of the service comes in: Del.icio.us lets users see others' link collections.

If a user finds someone's list compelling, he can subscribe to it and thus be notified when more bookmarks are added to it.

Just like every user has a personal page in del.icio.us, each tag also has a page with a list of all the bookmarks it describes. Users can also subscribe to tag pages, such as "politics" or "music," and be alerted when items are added to them.