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The forgotten social network
Is there a quieter social network than Delicious? This unobtrusive, forgotten, but strangely intimate service, remains a key part of my every day consumption.
I barely hear a word about Delicious. Its own blog, seven posts this year folks, tells its own story about the lack of energy seemingly being expended on it. But more than this, I rarely hear people talking about it – it’s part of the furniture of our web experience, but nearly invisible to us, like a battered, familiar armchair or a well worn rug.
I’ve used Delicious for over five years as my bookmarking service, but only properly in the eighteen months or so as a social network. And it’s here where I think Delicious delivers something a bit special. Despite its best efforts.
Every morning, alongside some industrial strength coffee, Twitter and my RSS reader of choice, my day begins with taking a look at my network on Delicious and a glance at what others have been reading. It’s my means of seeing what others judge to be important, a valuable filter to the mixture of noise and signal of RSS and Twitter. It can be broader in scope too – giving you more insight into not just what the people you are following are saying, but what’s informing their opinions.
This is what I mean by the attractive quietness of Delicious. It doesn’t push this information at you. It’s undemanding to the point of being almost introverted. And yet, Delicious feels to me like peering over shoulder of some of the best read people in our community and learning from them.
My own network is very unscientific, made up of people I’m lucky enough to know – like Matthew Solle, Natasja Giezen or Farhan Lalji – and those I don’t know, but wish I did – Derek Powazek, Dan Hill, Adam Greenfield amongst others, the people who’s every word I’ve read over the years. Very occasionally I’ll send a link the way of someone else, but mostly, I’m quietly harvesting and sharing my own bookmarks, and seeing what my fellow digital librarians are bookmarking.
Delicious, of course, makes all this harder than it need be. You stumble on the Delicious accounts of others via their websites, particularly if they are auto-posting link updates, or find them via the networks of others, but there’s little obvious means of seeing what other people like me are reading, no way of finding my friends from other networks, no suggested accounts.
You can’t help but feel that with a bit of love and consideration, Delicious could become an important part of helping us all deal with the overload of information we commonly experience. Delicious feels neglected when it should be thriving. It’s long since past the stage of being of interest to tech blogs, but like the armchair or the rug, we’d miss it if it was gone.
Photography credit: The Colorful Library of an Interaction Designer, by See-ming Lee