It's del.icio.us

I don't know what took me so long. After seeing any number of posts on various weblogs about del.icio.us, I finally took a look. Then took the plunge. Now, I think we can safely say, I'm obsessed.

For those of you even later to the party than me, del.icio.us is an online bookmark manager, sort of. After you create an account, you can start adding URLs to your list through a form on their site or with a handy bookmarklet. Your bookmarks are stored in one place, available from multiple locations or even multiple browsers on the same computer.

If that's as far as you look, you probably won't be impressed. Rather than trying to present your bookmarks in some kind of fancy dynamic tree structure, they get dumped into a simple list. The real power (and fun) begins with the tags you can add to each URL.

Think keywords—more precisely, think terms you would use if you were searching for the URL. For instance, I used the tags "food cheese england" for the URL http://www.teddingtoncheese.co.uk/acatalog/de339.htm, which describes an English cheese called Stinking Bishop. The right side of the del.icio.us page has a list of all of the tags I've used for all of the bookmarks I've stored. I click on "cheese" and get a list of only those bookmarks that are tagged with "cheese".

To quote Al Pacino, "I'm just gettin' started!"

When you click on a tag, like "cheese", you also get a link to other URLs, from all users, that have the same tag. If a URL has been added people besides you, you'll get a link under it that reads "and X other people"; click on it and you can see what tags other people used for that URL.

Whether or not they intended it, the people behind del.icio.us have created something in the gap between Yahoo! (or DMOZ) and Google. Maybe the thing it's closest to is that "people who bought X also bought..." feature at Amazon.com.

Update. No sooner do I post this than I check NewsFire and find that Tom Coates has said it better than I have, and goes on to do something useful with the idea rather than just blathering on about how neat it is. (Thanks to Jason Kottke for the link.) Just another reminder that I either need to learn to write better or get out of the writing-in-my-spare-time-for-the-fun-of-it business.