Delicious.com

Back in 2003, a new website del.icio.us opened up for storing bookmarks. I discovered it a few years ago. It’s basically a site to store all your bookmarks / favorite sites / etc… and share them with others (or not). Many people use it for “social bookmarking” and that’s really how they want you to think of it. “Find sites and share them with others.”

I use it because it gives me a central location to store all my favorite websites. I can access my favorite sites from anywhere and any computer. If you use Firefox instead of internet explorer, you can get an add-in for it that will access your bookmarks and synchronize them. Here are the many uses that I love about it.

1) My home and work computers both have the add-in and all the same favorites. When I add a site at home, it gets added on my work computer. When I add a site at work, it gets added to the home computer. I guess technically it doesn’t get added to either because it’s all stored online, but you know what I mean.

2) TAGS instead of FOLDERS. This is the best thing about it. I can tag a website (say Netflix) with many tags and access them with whatever tag I want. For example, I just found a mortgage interest rate website a few days ago that helped me keep track of rates and know when I should lock in my mortgage rate. I could tag it with house, mortgage, interest, and MBS (mortgage backed securities). When I want to go back and find that site, I can search for any one of those tags and it will show up in the list. I love tags, they allow me to be “messy” with my bookmarks and still easily find whatever it is that I need. Kristen and I have over 270 bookmarks and can find everything we need very quickly.

3) You can look at your bookmarks in a cloud view (which I've just added to my blog on the right), meaning if you have 50 bookmarks with the tag “Candy” and only 1 bookmark with the tag “toothpaste”, the cloud will have large 28pt font for Candy, but small 6pt font for toothpaste. The example above would also indicate that you might want to visit a dentist.

4) The social bookmarking aspect of it is pretty cool. For instance, right now, I can see that someone has just bookmarked “50 ways to boost your energy without caffeine.” That looks interesting. However, you can choose to be more private (like myself) and only share sites that you want to share. You don’t need to share everything.

So that’s the overview.

The Del.icio.us site has always been pretty clunky and slow (with over 5 million users) from my point of view. It’s just been redesigned though, and it’s quicker, a little easier to use, and now has the actual site name delicious.com rather than del.icio.us (which I thought was kind of cool).

If you haven’t given delicious.com a try, go for it, you’ll probably like it.