devpapa

Learning from Del.icio.us

I've been reading and listening articles and podcasts that speak to the origin and motivation of del.icio.us.

It's Creator, Joshua Schachter needed a way to manage links he had curated personally or those sent to him by others. At first he had a text file where he saved all the links and tagged them so that it could be easily grepped. The bookmark feature in web browsers could not handle links numbering over 20,000. He needed a way to manage large numbers of links and share it with people. Del.icio.us eventually became that tool and it was a hit.

What I've learned so far is that a product is sometimes an evolution of different products or ideas. Before Del.icio.us there was Memepool, and Muxway, and of course the text file. I remember the photo sharing site Flickr evolved from a game idea the creators had.

Also it is sometimes necessary to break down a problem and solve a tiny piece first, or solve an adjacent problem just to get some experience in.

Since Schachter considers del.icio.us a service that complements blogs, social networks and RSS news aggregators, he says it's likely that partnership deals are on the horizon for del.icio.us, without speculating further.

When I think about the decisions that were made in terms of financing and product decisions there are a few lessons to learn. Del.icio.us grew quite fast, rather quickly, it was difficult and expensive to keep up. The server was always crashing and they needed money for new servers and engineers. This led to taking venture funding and eventually selling to Yahoo. If they had gone with an ad-supported model, or a subscription model, or a combination of the two, would things have turned out different? Who knows? But it's interesting to think about.

If Del.icio.us was a social bookmarking site, I'm interested in a personal bookmarking site that:

Just like Bear, no comments because comments = moderation and who wants to do that? But limited social sharing can work.

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