Journal.
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
Leave a comment
Cennydd
22 July, 11:09 AM #
Like you Andrew, I still find delicious extremely useful, but the redesign made matters worse and it gives off the stench of neglect (I heard someone describe Yahoo! as the place where startups go to die).
I’d love the powers that be at Yahoo to put some quality investment its way. In particular, some Delicious/Instapaper hybrid would be unstoppable.
Andrew Travers
22 July, 11:46 AM #
The ‘stench of neglect’ is a nice way of putting it Cennydd – agree both about the re-design, and Yahoo’s apparent lack of commitment in this and other startups too (see also Upcoming and perhaps Flickr).
Saddened to see that a number of those I am following are posting less and less on Delicious these days. A slow, lingering death.
Jeff Van Campen
22 July, 02:39 PM #
I still love delicious, but much of what I used delicious for in the past has been replaced by other services.
The “toread” tag has been replaced by Instapaper.
Marking interesting articles or blog posts I’ve read has been replaced by liking and sharing in Google Reader.
Your post may well revive my delicious use. I’ll be adding to my network and paying more attention to it over the coming weeks.
Andrew Massey
23 July, 07:08 AM #
I’ll hold my hand up and say that I’ve never really been a Delicious user, even though I was on the original pre-launch invitation subscription list.
Natasja and Andrew did convince me that it was worth using very quickly during my time at Precedent, but I always found the massive change to my normal way of working (Safari bookmarks) to hard to get past – a simple shortcut and pick a directory to assign it to.
Which is what I think is it’s second greatest flaw – the slightly-too-much-effort of it. (I know, I know – call me lazy.)
Which is why when I found DeliciousSafari (http://delicioussafari.com) I thought my needs had been answered, and I spent some time cleaning my desktop bookmarks and uploading them to Delicious… only to find that, because Yahoo is trying to standardize logins across all their services, I couldn’t use it.
Which leads me to it’s greatest flaw, already identified above by Cennydd and Andrew: Yahoo! ( I too had read that sagacious quote about Yahoo! being where start-ups go to die.)
Yahoo! has the opposite of the midas touch – everything they touch turns to sh*t. They’re a brand I want to love, but can’t. They make it impossible, put hurdles in the way. From what I have witnessed they’re a company of herd-like developers without enough creative thought to fully consider the implications of imposing an extremely rigid multi-site login across their services. It’s not just Delicious, but Yahoo Groups, Flickr, etc – the whole thing is a mess which, even as a supposed specialist internet consultant, I can’t fathom. But most importantly it doesn’t allow for (enough) interoperability with (enough) other systems, like Twitter or Facebook or Google do.
The mash-up of social media is what has made it the force it is today. IMHO Yahoo! isn’t embracing this enough, hence the decline in Delicious and also Flickr (see yesterday’s BBC infographic: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-10719042) – they just haven’t moved on enough with the times.
Welcome to Yahoo!‘s graveyard.
Natasja
23 July, 11:55 AM #
Dear folks at Yahoo.
I am a passionate user of both Delicious and Flickr and it pains my heart you’re letting both die a slow death. I know you’ve got other priorities. Priorities which probably earn you more cash.
So let’s do all of us a favour and sell sell both Delicious and Flickr so that other people can move them forward. You’re not showing either of these a lot of love, and there’s a whole set of users who desperately want these to move forward.
Flickr is my visual memory, Delicious my ‘I will at some point want to remember where I read this’ memory. I don’t want to lose this memory.
So Yahoo: bite the bullet and sell them to loving new owners who will show them a little more TLC.
Natasja (at time of writing 6673 links on Delicious)
Boon
23 July, 12:05 PM #
There is an even quieter alternative to delicious called pinboard.in.
And unlike delicious, it runs independently without the likes of Yahoo, and it just does everything a bookmarking service needs to do, so well.
Absolutely loving it.
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