Del.icio.us: Social bookmarking phenomenon

This makes a lot of sense to Gartner's Weiner, who believes that for social-bookmarking sites to achieve the necessary scale, they will have to become part of broader online services, such as social networks.

"It's important for social-bookmarking services to not only have their own environment but to find a way to go beyond it," Weiner says, adding that del.icio.us can add a lot of value as a complement to other services.

A big question is how easy or complicated it will be to integrate del.icio.us with other platforms, Weiner says.

Although del.icio.us doesn't collect much information from users, signs indicate that a majority are technically savvy. These signs include the topics of interest of the users as expressed by the sites they bookmark, and also the fact that about half of them access del.icio.us using the Firefox browser, which is mostly popular among technically savvy people. Schachter wants to broaden del.icio.us' appeal beyond this core set of users.

Of course, del.icio.us isn't alone in the social-bookmarking market. Competitors include small startups like Furl.com, de.lirio.us, StumbleUpon.com, as well as industry giants such as Ask Jeeves and Yahoo Inc., both of which have introduced services that let users save search results, annotate them and categorize them, and share saved results with other users.

In the meantime, Schachter and his team will continue trying to enhance del.icio.us.

"We'll just make it really, really useful and the rest will happen," he says. "It's a matter of trying to nail the UI [user interface] and architecture more than anything else."