Celebrating the most important marriage of the week…

April 28, 2011 By Leave a Comment

And no, it’s not the royal wedding. As much as I hope Kate and William have a long and happy life together, they’re not friends or acquintances, and as part of a consititutional monarchy, they’re unlikely to have any effect on my life. I’m celebrating the marriage of Delicious, the incredibly useful and powerful social bookmarking service which was neglected since acquisition by Yahoo, with new owners AVOS, which despite sounding like a major shopping website, is actually the new company from Youtube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen.

I’ve written in the past about Delicious alternatives, and how I ended up moving from using Delicious as my primary bookmarking tool to using Diigo with Delicious as a backup. But this could change things.

  • Hurley and Chen have a lot of experience in social information sharing – that’s essentially what Youtube is. Upload your video data and use some quick and simple social tools to hopefully get a response.
  • Delicious may have stagnated but there’s a huge amount of data there, just waiting to be utilised more effectively.
  • The AVOS press release regarding the acquisition references making it ‘easier and more fun to save, share and discover‘, plus ‘The YouTube founders plan to work closely with the community over the next few months to develop innovative features to help solve the problem of information overload‘. Two of those issues have been key to Delicious, and the third is something which is become an increasingly timely problem.

And lastly, I have a bit of a hypothesis that this may be a project that Hurley and Chen will look to build longterm rather than setting up for an acquisition in 18 months as happened with Youtube. Firstly, Delicious has been on the block for a while, and social bookmarking tools aren’t exactly hot commodities. Secondly, this isn’t their hope to make enough cash to live on for the rest of their lives – they’ve been there and done that. Much like Kevin Rose and Ev Williams are ‘pivoting’ what they are working on, or Alexis Ohanian, Reddit co-founder, is returning to Reddit as an advisor, I suspect Delicious could be something that Hurley and Chen cared enough about to acquire and set-up as something they hold onto – if not, why spend the money on acquiring an existing community when their names and expertise could probably build up something from scratch to the same level pretty fast with no acquisition cost?

That last paragraph is all optimism and speculation, but one thing I do know is that we’re sure to see some positive changes to Delicious, and it’s now being run by people who really know the power of data, social and sharing.

Filed Under: Useful Tools Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Open social bookmarking service to rival Delicious

April 1, 2011 By 5 Comments

A quick check has shown that I’ve been using Delicious since November 2006, although my addiction to Google Reader means I’ve never used social bookmarking as heavily as some friends and colleagues. Around two years later, in October 2008, I started using Diigo as my primary social bookmarking tool – not only does it rival Delicious in terms of general features, but it has a handy auto-export for Delicious, meaning that I would always have a duplicate of the 600+ bookmarks I stored since (lately the majority have been saved to auto-feed out to 140char.com)

But although Delicious has been threatened with sale by owner Yahoo, and Diigo has performed faultlessly, all the new innovation and launches in storing and sharing links have either been aggregators for the iPad, or semantic tools which seem to have failed to gain enough internet from people – presumably because such a large percentage of internet users neither know nor care what the hell ‘semantic’ means or can do for them.

So it’s nice that the horror of April Fools Day for an information-obsessed tech fan has been alleviated by news of Freelish.us (h/t/ Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb). It’s a new social bookmarking service based on the existing Status.net alternative to Twitter, which is standards-based, and allows you to either use the hosted service, or install it on your own servers, change the design, and in the future, Status.net installations will have the social bookmarking features as an option.

So you can now also find me as badgergravling on Freelish.us.

It’ll be interesting to see whether there are more possibilities for Freelish.us than with Delicious and Diigo. I’ve never really built huge networks on social bookmarking sites (50 on delicious, 8 on diggo), compared with social networks (3.5k on Twitter, 500+ on FB), and perhaps the mix of bookmarketing and social networking will change that in this case.

The other reason for finding it interesting is whether the ability to install and run Status.net and Freelish.us will come in useful for my own businesses and their clients. Certainly communicating and sharing information within the company firewall is possible with paid and free tools already, but this might also up a middle ground for creating a client service, for example. Either way, it’ll be interesting to watch, and I continue to be an impressed observer of how Status.net operates, including identi.ca.

Filed Under: open source, social networks Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Last night a cloud saved my life…

January 20, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Cloud-based computing is a popular topic at the moment, and it’s opening up a plethora of possibilities for ways to interface with data. But to be honest, the way it’s helped me in the last 24 hours is much more important at the moment.

Tomorrow I’ve got the pleasure of speaking at a conference and everything was well-organised and prepared until a small error resulted in the saved presentation file being wiped off the face of the earth… And in a long story of unwise decisions cut short, there was no backup available. All presentation and all notes gone…

Except…

While I didn’t have the Word.doc with notes, I save pretty much everything I could ever want or need to reference. It’s tagged on Google Reader in the case of RSS feeds from about 200+ sites (My shared Google Reader items are here), and/or tagged on Diigo as a social bookmark. I use Diigo for two reasons – one: when I first started using it, the options for autoposting to blogs looked simpler to implement than Delicious, and two: It features an autoshare to Delicious option, meaning that I essentially have an automatic backup for either social bookmarking site.

Combined with a quick check of any relevant emails via Gmail, it means that pretty much every reference source is available at home, at work, or on the train if the wifi holds up.

And after the reminder about regular backups, I’ve made sure that it’s saved regular both on my laptop and removable hard drive. And even more useful is the fact it’s saved on Dropbox, which means it’s synched across laptop and desktop, available anywhere with an internet connection, and even better – if the presentation ends up too big for most corporate email services, I can easily share it via Dropbox for someone to download. Plus Dropbox has a 2GB storage limit for free.

I’m not saying any of this as any kind of paid endorsement (although free upgrades are nice, and paid advertising on here is never a bad thing), just as a public reminder about the benefits of backing up, and of using three services which are pretty much an essential part of my life now, and that I’d rather not do without.

Filed Under: Blogging, Cloud Computing, Useful Tools Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Google RSS Reader finally allows social bookmarking

August 13, 2009 By 3 Comments

One of my guilty confessions is that I’ve been doing less linking and sharing of other sites on places like Stumbleupon recently than in the past.

A major reason for that is that I’m generally going through my reading on the train in Google RSS reader, and not actually visiting sites. Combine the slow speed of the onboard wifi with the hassle of coming out of my RSS feed to recommend things on a regular basis, and you might be sympathetic as to why it’s a bit of a hassle.

But no longer – in addition to the places which allow me to import my RSS shared items (Friendfeed, Publish 2 etc), Google’s Matt Cutts revealed today that Google Reader now has a ‘send to’ option for Twitter, Stumbleupon, Digg etc from within the feedreader, and that you can also set it up for sites which aren’t currently listed.

Like him, it’s a feature I’ve wanted since I started using Google for RSS reading, and combined with the improved social tools for sharing and following with other Google RSS readers (And with an 84% share in one example, there’s quite a few!), and RSS is back in the game alongside sharing links on Twitter etc.

(Incidentally, to enable it, just go to settings, and it’s under the ‘Send To’ tab.)

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