My missing delight at del.icio.us

del.icio.usFor over about a year I’ve been using del.icio.us to keep my bookmarks synced between work, home, and any other computer I use. Del.icio.us indeed is delightful, yet I’m missing some features and have encountered some – at least to me they appear as being such – bugs.

Let me start off with a feature I really like and that got introduced in March 2006: Private Saving Ryan, which enables you to save bookmarks as being private. Very handy since I don’t want everyone to know what I’m bookmarking. Yes, I’m a bit keen on keeping them private since del.icio.us not only holds my bookmarks, it also acts as a knowledge base for my everyday work: webdevelopment.

However, I do have some friends that I want to share my bookmarks with (those friends being – in no particular order – GoOve_, Dextro, JovanStanimirovic, sylter & cafeine.be), since they too are webdevelopers/webdesigners and I want to share my knowledge base with them, so that they too can benefit from some of the handy bookmarks I have. I can hear you all say that one can use the links for you feature (by using the for: prefix) to “suggest an URL to someone”. Well, I can say that it doesn’t work when you’ve set the bookmark to being private; this obviously is a bug to me. Above that, del.icio.us is very case sensitive. Having an URL tagged with for:goove_ will not show up at GoOve_’s bookmarks (even it shared publically); bug #2.

I’ve mailed the del.icio.us staff about this (only about the first one, as I’ve only discovered the second one a few days ago) a few months ago, got a reply back that they’ll look into it, but nothing has changed since then.

UPDATE: The “links for you” feature now does work when having a site tagged as private, yet it still is Case Sensitive (goove_ vs. goOve_) and – unfortunately – del.icio.us always suggest the usernames in full lowercase 🙁

private saving ryan

Elaborating a bit further on the private saving: it’s a neat feature, but wouldn’t it be neater (read: time-saving) to having an option named “set private by default”, so that one does not has to check the private box everytime one wants to bookmark an URI?

Taking the private saving feature to the next level, wouldn’t it be way more neat to define some users as “hey, this dude/dudette can ALWAYS see ALL my bookmarks, even the private ones”? Taking it even a wee bit higher than that next level, wouldn’t it be extremely neat to having an option to allow your network to see ALL of your bookmarks (of course the connection has to be mutual)? Now that would make the “private saving” and “network feature” very interesting (and combine them), and even give the “your network” feature a real goal, since the goal now – marking someone as your friend – doesn’t add any extra to del.icio.us imo.

Since I’m a bit freewheeling here (yet giving realistic suggestions and solutions), I was wondering what features others are missing, or want to see improved. I’m not talking about overhauling the concept of del.icio.us (thus no “add a discussion to URLs”, “make it digg like”, … although rumour has it that that might happen), but only some basic changes that would make del.icio.us even better than it already is. Some of the – already existing – handy features I’m hinting towards are, for example, integration of a thumbnail when having tagged a photo from flickr, and the playtagger when having tagged an mp3 (outlined in green on the screenshot below).

del.icio.us neat features

How can we improve del.icio.us? After all, it’s made out of the people, isn’t it?

B!

Published by Bramus!

Bramus is a frontend web developer from Belgium, working as a Chrome Developer Relations Engineer at Google. From the moment he discovered view-source at the age of 14 (way back in 1997), he fell in love with the web and has been tinkering with it ever since (more …)

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3 Comments

  1. right, i signed up there once!

    ah, but i never really use it, just signed up to play a bit with it.
    but i dont like and dont need it. my work is just 10 meters away from ym home, so when i really need something i go home 🙂

    and besides that:
    i hate the look of delicious, looks w98’ish. ugly.

  2. @manuel:
    Whoaw!… what a luxury to work 10 meters from home…
    The look of delicious is indeed a little boring. However it’s strenght is in the functionality and not the design.
    I wouldn’t mind if they redesigned it a little though… 😉

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