Del.icio.us – For You and Upgrade Preview
I love Del.icio.us. It’s an awesome service. I don’t really use local bookmarks anymore due to its integration with my browsers (except for my most common ones I throw into my linkbar or bookmarks menu).
Well, they are about to upgrade their service and TechCrunch has a preview. It looks like a complete upgrade and they’ve added lots of useful features.
If you aren’t familiar with Del.icio.us, it’s time you learned a bit about it. So begins today’s tech info!
Del.icio.us: http://del.icio.us
Yeah… that’s the address. It’s using a spelling trick and the .US domain. So the “.us” replaces the “.com” you normally see. There are lots of these endings for different countries so that’s why you’ll see odd ones at times.
So what is the service Del.icio.us provides? It’s an online, social bookmarking service. The social aspect can be used or not, up to you. It’s nice for keeping track of friend’s or company’s bookmarks. I have Adobe’s bookmarks connected to mine since they have lots of tutorials for their products listed there.
The bookmarking is where you’ll get the most use out of this service – makes sense considering this is the main purpose of the site. It provides an unlimited database of your bookmarks in an organized and searchable manner. So why would you save your bookmarks here instead of just in your browser? Well, I’ll give you my reasons and I think you’ll see why its useful.
Reason the First: Multiple Computers and Multiple Browsers
I use a computer at work and two computers at home. The two computers at home use three or four different browsers depending on the situation on two different operating systems. So how do I keep all the bookmarks between them synced so I have what I need where I need it? Del.icio.us bookmarks to the rescue! I store them online and then it doesn’t matter where I am, the bookmarks are all there for me when I need them.
Reason the Second: Storage and Sorting
I like to bookmark anything interesting I might want to come back to someday. Especially tech tips that I might not need now but will need in the future. This can amount to a HUGE repository of bookmarks. Organizing and finding these bookmarks again can be a pain. I would end up being very selective of what I’d bookmark in order to keep it all manageable. Del.icio.us makes it easy to give a bookmark multiple references via tags, titles, and descriptions.
Using tags is the biggest help. If I know a bookmark has to do with a Mac product at an online store, then I will give it the following tags: Mac, product, shopping. If it’s a funny video, it gets the following tags: humor, multimedia, video. Now I can use any single tag or mix of tags to find specific types of bookmarks. This eliminates the need for deciding on one single folder to put them in on my “bookmarks” folder.
Reason the Third: Integration
The biggest obstacle to converting over to Del.icio.us is getting the bookmarks online and accessing them again. Obviously having them right in your browser with an easy menu or button to access or add new bookmarks is easier than going to a website and entering all the info in manually. Del.icio.us knew this and offers multiple ways of integrating your Del.icio.us account with pretty much any browser.
For Firefox and Internet Explorer, there is an add-on that puts buttons and controls right into the browser. You access and add bookmarks right from the browser as if it was your regular local bookmarks or favorites. For other browsers, there are bookmarklets and 3rd party sync products.
How do they really integrate? If you are at a site you want to bookmark, instead of clicking on “add bookmark” or “add favorite”, you click on the “Tag” button or the “tag” bookmarklet and a form window will open with the current site address and title already filled in. Now you just enter a description and some tags (which will autocomplete your already created tags) and hit enter and that’s it. To get at your online bookmarks, you just click the Del.icio.us icon from the add-in and you’ll be able to view the last few bookmarks, the tag organization and even search right from the browser.
I do still keep some of my most common bookmarks in my bookmarks bar (about 15 or so), but for everything else… del.icio.us all the way.
So that’s the basic gist of the whole thing. You can see my del.icio.us bookmarks on the right side of this page. Hopefully you’ll find this service useful and the new upgrades look like it will be even better.
For more detailed information, the Del.icio.us Help is very useful and user friendly.
Referenced Items:
Firefox Add-on
Internet Explorer Add-on
Bookmarklets
3rd Party Integration:
Safari: Delicious2Safari
Camino: Caminicious
UPDATE: Just learned that del.icio.us name is being rebranded to delicious.com with this upgrade. Both addresses will work but it seems delicious.com will become the new official name. Makes sense. The del.icio.us naming is a bit awkward and the “funny name” thing kind of got old.
UPDATE2: Common Craft video about using del.icio.us is an excellent visual to help understand social bookmarking.
Related posts:
